《上帝的历史》获得更多评论界赞誉。

More critical acclaim for A History of God

作者：凯伦·阿姆斯特朗

Also by Karen Armstrong

穿过窄门

Through the Narrow Gate

世界的开始

Beginning the World

第一位基督徒：圣保罗对基督教的影响

The First Christian: St. Paul’s Impact on Christianity

火焰之舌：宗教与诗歌体验选集

Tongues of Fire: An Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience

《女性福音：基督教在西方引发的性别战争》

The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West

圣战：十字军东征及其对当今世界的影响

Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World

十四世纪英国神秘主义者

The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century

穆罕默德：先知的传记

Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet

耶路撒冷：一座城，三种信仰

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

创世之初：对创世记的新解读

In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis

伊斯兰教简史

Islam: A Short History

为上帝而战：原教旨主义史

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism

佛

Buddha

内容

Contents

介绍

Introduction

一个童年时期，我拥有许多坚定的宗教信仰，但对上帝却缺乏真正的信心。相信一系列命题与真正能够信赖这些命题的信仰之间是有区别的。我当时完全相信上帝的存在；我也相信基督在圣餐中的真实临在、圣礼的功效、永世受罚的前景以及炼狱的客观存在。然而，我不能说我对这些关于终极实在本质的宗教观点的信仰，让我对尘世生活是否美好或有益抱有多少信心。我童年时期的罗马天主教信仰相当可怕。詹姆斯·乔伊斯在《青年艺术家画像》中对此描述得非常贴切：我听过不少关于地狱之火的布道。事实上，地狱似乎比上帝更真实，因为它是我可以想象并理解的。而上帝则是一个有些模糊的形象，它存在于抽象的理论概念中，而非具体的图像之中。大约八岁的时候，我被要求背诵教义问答中对“上帝是什么？”这个问题的答案：“上帝是至高无上的灵，祂是独一无二的，祂自身存在，并且在一切完美中都是无限的。” 不出所料，这个答案对我来说毫无意义，而且我必须承认，它至今仍然让我感到冷漠。在我看来，这始终是一个枯燥乏味、自命不凡且傲慢的定义。然而，自从写了这本书之后，我开始认为这个定义也是错误的。

AS A CHILD, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God. There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them. I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory. I cannot say, however, that my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here on earth was good or beneficent. The Roman Catholicism of my childhood was a rather frightening creed. James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I listened to my share of hellfire sermons. In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively. God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images. When I was about eight years old, I had to memorize this catechism answer to the question, “What is God?”: “God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections.” Not surprisingly, it meant little to me, and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold. It has always seemed a singularly arid, pompous and arrogant definition. Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also incorrect.

随着年龄增长，我逐渐意识到宗教的意义远不止恐惧。我阅读圣徒传记、玄学派诗人的作品、T·S·艾略特的著作，以及一些神秘主义者的简明著作。我开始被礼拜仪式的优美所打动，虽然上帝仍然遥不可及，但我感觉与神沟通是可能的。为了突破与他的隔阂，并相信这异象将改变整个受造界，我加入了一个修会。作为一名见习修士和年轻的修女，我深入了解了信仰。我潜心学习护教学、圣经、神学和教会历史。我深入研究了修道生活的历史，并开始细致地探讨我们修会的会规——我们必须背诵它。奇怪的是，在这一切中，上帝几乎从未出现。人们的注意力似乎都集中在次要的细节和宗教的边缘方面。我在祈祷中与自己搏斗，试图强迫自己与上帝相遇，但他始终是一位严厉的督导者，监视着我每一次违反会规的行为，或者令人捉摸不透地缺席。我读到的关于圣徒狂喜的故事越多，就越感到自己的失败。我痛苦地意识到，我仅有的那点宗教体验，都是我自己用自己的感觉和想象力构建出来的。有时，虔诚之情是对格里高利圣咏和礼仪之美的审美回应。但实际上，我从未感受到任何来自自身之外的启示。我从未瞥见过先知和神秘主义者所描述的上帝。我们谈论耶稣基督的次数远多于谈论“上帝”，而耶稣基督似乎只是一个纯粹的历史人物，与古典晚期密不可分。我也开始对教会的一些教义产生严重的怀疑。谁又能确定耶稣就是道成肉身的上帝呢？这种信仰又意味着什么？新约圣经真的教导了那复杂且自相矛盾的三位一体教义吗？还是像许多其他信条一样，是基督在耶路撒冷去世几个世纪后，神学家们捏造出来的？

As I grew up, I realized that there was more to religion than fear. I read the lives of the saints, the metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot and some of the simpler writings of the mystics. I began to be moved by the beauty of the liturgy and, though God remained distant, I felt that it was possible to break through to him and that the vision would transfigure the whole of created reality. To do this I entered a religious order and, as a novice and a young nun, I learned a good deal more about the faith. I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart. Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate—and highly self-contradictory—doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?

最终，我带着遗憾离开了宗教生活。一旦摆脱了失败和不足的重负，我对上帝的信仰也悄然消逝。尽管我曾竭尽所能地让他影响我的生活，但他从未真正介入过。如今，我不再对他感到愧疚和焦虑，他变得遥不可及，不再像一个真实的存在。然而，我对宗教的兴趣并未消退，我制作了一些关于基督教早期历史和宗教体验本质的电视节目。我对宗教历史了解得越多，我早年的疑虑似乎就越发显得有道理。我孩提时代不假思索地接受的那些教义，实际上是人为的，是经过漫长岁月构建而成的。科学似乎已经否定了造物主的存在，而圣经学者也证明耶稣从未自称是神。作为一名癫痫患者，我偶尔会出现一些幻觉，我知道那只是神经系统缺陷：那么，圣徒们的异象和狂喜难道也仅仅是心理作用吗？怪癖？上帝似乎越来越像是一种异类，是人类早已超越的存在。

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programs about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.

尽管我做了多年的修女，但我并不认为我对上帝的体验是特殊的。我对上帝的认知形成于童年时期，并没有随着我在其他学科知识的增长而发展。我修正了童年时期对圣诞老人的简单印象；我对人类困境的复杂性有了比幼儿园时期更为成熟的理解。然而，我早期对上帝的模糊认知却没有得到修正或发展。没有我这种特殊宗教背景的人，或许也会发现他们对上帝的认知形成于婴儿时期。自那时起，我们便抛弃了孩童时代的事物，也抛弃了最初那位上帝。

Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years.

然而，我对宗教史的研究表明，人类是具有精神性的动物。事实上，有人认为智人（Homo sapiens）也是宗教人（Homo religiosus）。人类从具有可辨识的人类形态之初就开始崇拜神灵；他们创造宗教的同时，也创造了艺术作品。这并非仅仅因为他们想要取悦强大的力量；这些早期信仰表达了人类对这美丽而又令人恐惧的世界的体验中始终存在的惊奇和神秘。如同艺术一样，宗教也是一种在肉体注定要承受苦难的前提下，寻找生命意义和价值的尝试。如同任何其他人类活动一样，宗教也可能被滥用，但它似乎是我们一直以来都在做的事情。它并非由善于操纵的君王和祭司强加于人类原始的世俗本性之上，而是人类与生俱来的。事实上，我们当前的世俗主义是一项全新的实验，在人类历史上前所未有。我们尚待观察它最终会如何运作。同样不可否认的是，我们西方的自由人文主义并非与生俱来；它如同对艺术或诗歌的鉴赏一样，需要后天培养。人文主义本身就是一种无神的宗教——当然，并非所有宗教都是有神论的。我们世俗的伦理理想拥有其自身的精神和心灵修养，并为人们提供了在人生终极意义中寻求信仰的途径，而这些途径曾经是由更为传统的宗教所提供的。

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

当我开始研究犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教这三大一神论宗教中关于上帝观念和体验的历史时，我原本以为上帝只不过是人类需求和欲望的投射。我以为“他”会反映出社会在各个发展阶段的恐惧和渴望。我的预想并非完全没有道理，但我的一些发现却令我大吃一惊，我真希望自己三十年前就能了解到这一切。很久以前，当我开始宗教生活的时候，如果当时我能听到——来自三大宗教的杰出一神论者——告诉我，与其等待上帝从天而降，不如主动去创造对他的感知，那该多好啊！其他的拉比、牧师和苏菲派人士会责备我，认为上帝——无论从哪个意义上来说——都是“外在的”现实；他们会警告我，不要指望能像运用理性思维那样，通过客观事实去体验他。他们会告诉我，在某种重要意义上，上帝是创造性想象的产物，就像我所欣赏的诗歌和音乐一样。一些德高望重的一神论者会平静而坚定地告诉我，上帝并不真正存在——然而，“他”却是世间最重要的现实。

When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that “he” would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified, but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings, and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear—from eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was—in any sense—a reality “out there”; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist—and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world.

本书并非对超越时空、不可言喻的上帝本身进行历史叙述，而是讲述自亚伯拉罕至今，人类对上帝的认知演变史。人类对上帝的理解本身就具有历史性，因为在不同的历史时期，不同的群体对上帝的理解总会略有不同。一代人对上帝的理解，在另一代人眼中可能毫无意义。事实上，“我信上帝”这句话本身并没有客观意义，它和其他任何陈述一样，只有在特定的语境下，由特定的群体宣告时，才具有意义。因此，“上帝”一词本身并不包含一个永恒不变的概念；相反，它包含了一系列含义，其中一些含义甚至相互矛盾或互斥。如果上帝的概念缺乏这种灵活性，它就不会流传至今，成为人类最伟大的思想之一。当一种上帝观念失去意义或相关性时，它就会被悄然抛弃，并被新的神学所取代。原教旨主义者会否认这一点，因为原教旨主义是反历史的：它认为亚伯拉罕、摩西和后来的先知们对上帝的体验与今天的人们完全相同。然而，如果我们审视三大宗教，就会发现并不存在客观的“上帝”形象：每一代人都必须创造出适合自己的上帝形象。无神论也是如此。“我不信上帝”这句话在历史上每个时期都略有不同。多年来被贴上“无神论者”标签的人，始终都在否定某种特定的神性观念。今天无神论者所否定的“上帝”，是先祖的上帝、先知的上帝、哲学家的上帝、神秘主义者的上帝，还是十八世纪自然神论者的上帝？所有这些神祇都曾受到人们的敬仰。在犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教的不同历史时期，上帝都曾被奉为《圣经》和《古兰经》中的神。我们将看到，他们彼此之间存在着巨大的差异。无神论往往是一种过渡状态：因此，犹太教徒、基督教徒和穆斯林都曾被他们同时代的异教徒称为“无神论者”，因为他们接受了关于神性和超越性的革命性观念。现代无神论是否也是对一个已不再足以应对我们时代问题的“神”的否定呢？

This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement “I believe in God” has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is no one unchanging idea contained in the word “God”; instead, the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed “atheists” over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the “God” who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points of their history. We shall see that they are very different from one another. Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a “God” which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?

尽管宗教带有超凡脱俗的色彩，但它本质上却是非常务实的。我们将看到，对于某种特定的上帝观念而言，其有效性远比其逻辑或科学上的严谨性重要得多。一旦它不再有效，就会被改变——有时甚至会变成截然不同的东西。这在当时的大多数一神论者看来并不构成困扰，因为他们非常清楚，他们关于上帝的观念并非神圣不可侵犯，而只是暂时的。这些观念完全是人为构建的——它们只能如此——并且与它们所象征的那不可言喻的实在截然不同。有些人甚至发展出相当大胆的方式来强调这种本质区别。一位中世纪的神秘主义者甚至声称，这种被误称为“上帝”的终极实在，在《圣经》中根本没有提及。纵观历史，人们都体验过一种似乎超越世俗的精神维度。事实上，能够以这种方式构想超越自身认知的概念，正是人类思维一个引人注目的特征。无论我们如何解读，这种人类体验到的超越性一直是生活的一部分。并非所有人都将其视为神圣的：正如我们将看到的，佛教徒会否认他们的洞见和感悟源于超自然力量；他们认为这些是人类与生俱来的。然而，所有主要宗教都认同，这种超越性无法用常规的概念语言来描述。一神论者称这种超越性为“上帝”，但他们也附加了许多重要的限制条件。例如，犹太教徒被禁止念诵上帝的圣名，穆斯林则不得试图用视觉图像描绘神圣。这些戒律提醒我们，我们称之为“上帝”的现实超越了一切人类的表达。

Despite its otherworldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We shall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective it will be changed—sometimes for something radically different. This did not disturb most monotheists before our own day because they were quite clear that their ideas about God were not sacrosanct but could only be provisional. They were entirely man-made—they could be nothing else—and quite separate from the indescribable Reality they symbolized. Some developed quite audacious ways of emphasizing this essential distinction. One medieval mystic went so far as to say that this ultimate Reality—mistakenly called “God”—was not even mentioned in the Bible. Throughout history, men and women have experienced a dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world. Indeed, it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience of transcendence has been a fact of life. Not everybody would regard it as divine: Buddhists, as we shall see, would deny that their visions and insights are derived from a supernatural source; they see them as natural to humanity. All the major religions, however, would agree that it is impossible to describe this transcendence in normal conceptual language. Monotheists have called this transcendence “God,” but they have hedged this around with important provisos. Jews, for example, are forbidden to pronounce the sacred Name of God, and Muslims must not attempt to depict the divine in visual imagery. The discipline is a reminder that the reality that we call “God” exceeds all human expression.

这并非通常意义上的历史，因为上帝的观念并非从某一点线性演化而来，最终形成某种定论。科学概念的运作方式或许如此，但艺术和宗教的观念却并非如此。正如爱情诗歌的主题数量有限，人们对上帝的描述也总是千篇一律。事实上，我们会发现犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教对神性的理解存在着惊人的相似之处。尽管犹太教徒和穆斯林都认为基督教的三位一体和道成肉身教义几乎……尽管这些教义被认为是亵渎神明的，但他们还是创作出了自己版本的这些充满争议的神学理论。然而，每一种对这些普世主题的表达都略有不同，这展现了人类想象力在努力表达其对“上帝”的理解时所展现出的独创性和创造力。

This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final conception. Scientific notions work like that, but the ideas of art and religion do not. Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine. Even though Jews and Muslims both find the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation almost blasphemous, they have produced their own versions of these controversial theologies. Each expression of these universal themes is slightly different, however, showing the ingenuity and inventiveness of the human imagination as it struggles to express its sense of “God.”

由于这是一个非常庞大的话题，我特意将讨论范围限定在犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教所敬拜的唯一真神上，尽管为了更清晰地阐明一神论的观点，我也偶尔会探讨异教、印度教和佛教关于终极实在的观念。似乎上帝的概念与那些发展起来相当独立的宗教中的观念有着惊人的相似之处。无论我们对上帝是否存在得出何种结论，这一概念的历史必然会告诉我们一些关于人类思维和我们追求本质的重要信息。尽管西方社会在很大程度上呈现出世俗化的倾向，但上帝的概念仍然影响着数百万人的生活。最近的调查显示，99%的美国人表示他们相信上帝：问题是，在众多可供选择的“上帝”中，他们信奉的是哪一位呢？

Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people. Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine percent of Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which “God” of the many on offer do they subscribe to?

神学常常给人以枯燥抽象之感，但关于上帝的历史却充满激情与张力。与其他一些终极概念不同，上帝最初伴随着痛苦的挣扎与煎熬。以色列的先知们将他们的上帝体验为一种撕扯他们四肢的肉体痛苦，令他们既愤怒又狂喜。一神论者常常在极端的境况下体验他们所称之为上帝的现实：我们将读到山巅、黑暗、荒凉、十字架和恐惧。西方对上帝的体验似乎尤其痛苦。这种内在的紧张感源于何处？其他一神论者则谈论光明和变形。他们运用极其大胆的意象来表达他们所体验的现实的复杂性，这远远超越了正统神学的范畴。近年来，人们对神话的兴趣重新燃起，这或许表明人们普遍渴望以更具想象力的方式表达宗教真理。已故美国学者约瑟夫·坎贝尔的著作广受欢迎：他探索了人类永恒的神话，将古代神话与传统社会中至今仍在流传的神话联系起来。人们通常认为三大神论宗教缺乏神话和诗意的象征意义。然而，尽管一神论者最初拒绝接受异教邻居的神话，但这些神话往往会在后来悄然融入他们的信仰之中。例如，一些神秘主义者认为上帝化身为女性。另一些人则虔诚地谈论上帝的性欲，并将女性元素引入神性之中。

Theology often comes across as dull and abstract, but the history of God has been passionate and intense. Unlike some other conceptions of the ultimate, it was originally attended by agonizing struggle and stress. The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation. The reality that they called God was often experienced by monotheists in a state of extremity: we shall read of mountaintops, darkness, desolation, crucifixion and terror. The Western experience of God seemed particularly traumatic. What was the reason for this inherent strain? Other monotheists spoke of light and transfiguration. They used very daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology. There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies. It is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic symbolism. Yet, although monotheists originally rejected the myths of their pagan neighbors, these often crept back into the faith at a later date. Mystics have seen God incarnated in a woman, for example. Others reverently speak of God’s sexuality and have introduced a female element into the divine.

这就引出了一个难题。因为这位神最初是一位男性神祇，所以一神论者通常用“他”来指代他。近年来，情况发生了变化。多年来，女权主义者对此提出反对意见，这完全可以理解。由于我将记录那些称上帝为“他”的人的思想和见解，因此我使用了传统的男性术语，除非“它”更为恰当。然而，或许值得一提的是，在英语中，以男性视角谈论上帝尤其成问题。但在希伯来语、阿拉伯语和法语中，语法性别赋予神学论述一种性别的对位和辩证关系，这提供了一种英语中常常缺失的平衡。因此，在阿拉伯语中，至高无上的上帝之名“真主”（ al-Lah）在语法上是阳性，但指代上帝神圣而深不可测的本质的词“真主”（al-Dhat ）却是阴性。

This brings me to a difficult point. Because this God began as a specifically male deity, monotheists have usually referred to it as “he.” In recent years, feminists have understandably objected to this. Since I shall be recording the thoughts and insights of people who called God “he,” I have used the conventional masculine terminology, except when “it” has been more appropriate. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God—al-Dhat—is feminine.

所有关于上帝的讨论都因难以逾越的障碍而举步维艰。然而，一神论者在否认语言表达超越现实能力的同时，却都对语言抱有非常积极的态度。犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教的上帝，在某种意义上，是一位会说话的上帝。祂的圣言在这三大信仰中都至关重要。上帝的圣言塑造了我们文化的历史。我们必须思考，“上帝”这个词对我们今天是否还有意义。

All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties. Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who—in some sense—speaks. His Word is crucial in all three faiths. The Word of God has shaped the history of our culture. We have to decide whether the word “God” has any meaning for us today.

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注：由于我同时从犹太教、伊斯兰教和基督教的视角来探讨上帝的历史，因此西方常用的“公元前” （BC）和“公元” （AD ）这两个术语并不适用。所以我改用了“公元前”（ BCE，Before the Common Era）和“公元”（ CE，Common Era）这两个替代术语。

Note: Since I am looking at the history of God from the Jewish and the Muslim as well as the Christian perspective, the terms “BC” and “AD,” which are conventionally used in the West, are not appropriate. I have therefore had recourse to the alternatives “BCE” (Before the Common Era) and “CE” (Common Era).

1

起初……

1

In the Beginning …

我在创世之初，人类创造了一位神，祂是万物的始因，也是天地的主宰。祂没有偶像，也没有神庙或祭司侍奉祂。祂的地位太过崇高，人类的崇拜远远无法满足祂的需要。渐渐地，祂从人们的意识中淡去。祂变得如此遥远，以至于人们决定不再需要祂。最终，据说祂消失了。

IN THE BEGINNING, human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by images and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him anymore. Eventually he was said to have disappeared.

至少，这是威廉·施密特神父在其1912年首次出版的著作《上帝观念的起源》中提出的一种理论。施密特认为，在人类开始崇拜众多神灵之前，存在着一种原始的一神论。最初，他们只承认一位至高无上的神，祂创造了世界，并从遥远的地方统治着人类事务。对这样一位至高神（有时被称为天空之神，因为祂与天空相关）的信仰，至今仍是许多非洲土著部落宗教生活的一部分。他们通过祈祷向神祈祷；相信神在守护着他们，并将惩罚罪恶。然而，神却奇怪地缺席于他们的日常生活：祂没有特殊的崇拜仪式，也从未被描绘成神像。部落成员说，祂是不可言说的，不会被人类世界所玷污。有些人甚至说，祂已经“离去”了。人类学家认为，这位神变得如此遥远和高不可攀，以至于实际上已被地位较低的神灵和更容易接近的神祇所取代。施密特的理论也认为，在古代，至高神被异教万神殿中更具吸引力的神祇所取代。因此，最初只有一位神。如果真是如此，那么一神论就是人类最早发展起来的思想之一。人类试图用神明来解释生命的奥秘和悲剧。这也揭示了这样的神明可能面临的一些问题。

That, at least, is one theory, popularized by Father Wilhelm Schmidt in The Origin of the Idea of God, first published in 1912. Schmidt suggested that there had been a primitive monotheism before men and women had started to worship a number of gods. Originally they had acknowledged only one Supreme Deity, who had created the world and governed human affairs from afar. Belief in such a High God (sometimes called the Sky God, since he is associated with the heavens) is still a feature of the religious life in many indigenous African tribes. They yearn toward God in prayer; believe that he is watching over them and will punish wrongdoing. Yet he is strangely absent from their daily lives: he has no special cult and is never depicted in effigy. The tribesmen say that he is inexpressible and cannot be contaminated by the world of men. Some people say that he has “gone away.” Anthropologists suggest that this God has become so distant and exalted that he has in effect been replaced by lesser spirits and more accessible gods. So too, Schmidt’s theory goes, in ancient times, the High God was replaced by the more attractive gods of the pagan pantheons. In the beginning, therefore, there was One God. If this is so, then monotheism was one of the earliest ideas evolved by human beings to explain the mystery and tragedy of life. It also indicates some of the problems that such a deity might have to face.

这个问题无法确切证明。关于宗教的起源，众说纷纭。然而，创造神灵似乎是人类由来已久的本能。当一种宗教观念不再适用时，它就会被新的观念所取代。这些观念悄然消失，就像天神一样，没有引起任何轰动。在当今时代，许多人认为，犹太教徒、基督教徒和穆斯林几个世纪以来所崇拜的神，如今已如同天神一般遥远。有些人甚至声称他已经死去。的确，他似乎正在从越来越多的人的生活中消失，尤其是在西欧。人们说，他们的意识中出现了一个“神形空洞”，因为他曾经占据着那个位置。尽管在某些人看来他无关紧要，但他曾在我们的历史中扮演过至关重要的角色，也是人类历史上最伟大的思想之一。为了理解我们正在失去什么——如果他真的正在消失的话——我们需要了解人们开始崇拜这位神时的行为，了解他的意义以及他是如何被构想出来的。为此，我们需要回到古代中东世界，我们上帝的观念大约在14000年前逐渐在那里出现。

It is impossible to prove this one way or the other. There have been many theories about the origin of religion. Yet it seems that creating gods is something that human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced. These ideas disappear quietly, like the Sky God, with no great fanfare. In our own day, many people would say that the God worshipped for centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims has become as remote as the Sky God. Some have actually claimed that he has died. Certainly he seems to be disappearing from the lives of an increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe. They speak of a “God-shaped hole” in their consciousness where he used to be, because, irrelevant though he may seem in certain quarters, he has played a crucial role in our history and has been one of the greatest human ideas of all time. To understand what we are losing—if, that is, he really is disappearing—we need to see what people were doing when they began to worship this God, what he meant and how he was conceived. To do that we need to go back to the ancient world of the Middle East, where the idea of our God gradually emerged about 14,000 years ago.

如今宗教似乎不再重要的原因之一是，我们中的许多人不再感受到无形之物环绕着我们。科学文化教育我们专注于眼前的物质世界。这种看待世界的方式取得了巨大的成就。然而，其后果之一是，我们仿佛抹去了“精神”或“神圣”的感知，而这种感知曾经渗透到传统社会各个层面的人们的生活中，是我们人类体验世界的重要组成部分。在南太平洋岛屿上，人们称这种神秘的力量为玛那（mana）；其他人则将其体验为一种存在或灵魂；有时，它被感知为一种非人格化的力量，类似于放射性或电力。人们相信它存在于部落首领、植物、岩石或动物之中。拉丁人在神圣的树林中体验到努米纳（numina，精灵）；阿拉伯人则认为大地上居住着精灵（ jinn ） 。人们自然渴望与这种现实建立联系并使其为己所用，但他们也仅仅是为了欣赏它。当他们将无形的力量人格化，赋予它们神性，使之与风、太阳、海洋和星辰相关联，并拥有人类的特征时，他们便表达了自己与无形世界以及周围世界的亲近感。

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. This method of looking at the world has achieved great results. One of its consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world. In the South Sea Islands, they call this mysterious force mana; others experience it as a presence or spirit; sometimes it has been felt as an impersonal power, like a form of radioactivity or electricity. It was believed to reside in the tribal chief, in plants, rocks or animals. The Latins experienced numina (spirits) in sacred groves; Arabs felt that the landscape was populated by the jinn. Naturally people wanted to get in touch with this reality and make it work for them, but they also simply wanted to admire it. When they personalized the unseen forces and made them gods, associated with the wind, sun, sea and stars but possessing human characteristics, they were expressing their sense of affinity with the unseen and with the world around them.

鲁道夫·奥托，这位德国宗教史学家出版了他重要的著作。1917年出版的《神圣的观念》一书认为，这种“神圣感”是宗教的根本。它先于任何解释世界起源或寻找伦理行为基础的愿望。人类以不同的方式感知这种神圣的力量——有时它激发狂野的、酒神式的兴奋；有时它带来深沉的平静；有时，人们在面对这种蕴含于生活方方面面的神秘力量时，会感到恐惧、敬畏和谦卑。当人们开始创造神话并崇拜神灵时，他们并非在寻求对自然现象的字面解释。象征性的故事、洞穴壁画和雕刻，都是为了表达他们的惊奇，并将这种无处不在的神秘与自身生活联系起来；事实上，今天的诗人、艺术家和音乐家也常常受到类似愿望的驱使。例如，在旧石器时代，当农业发展起来时，对母神的崇拜表达了一种观念，即改变人类生活的生育力实际上是神圣的。艺术家们雕刻了将她描绘成裸体孕妇的雕像，考古学家在欧洲、中东和印度各地都发现了这些雕像。几个世纪以来，这位伟大的母亲在人们的想象中一直占据着重要的地位。如同古老的天空之神一样，她被后世神系所吸收，与更古老的神祇并肩而立。她通常是最强大的神祇之一，当然比天空之神更加强大，后者始终是一个相对神秘的人物。在古苏美尔，她被称为伊南娜；在巴比伦，她被称为伊什塔尔；在迦南，她被称为阿纳特；在埃及，她被称为伊西斯；在希腊，她被称为阿芙罗狄蒂。在所有这些文化中，人们都创造了惊人相似的故事来表达她在人们精神生活中的角色。这些神话并非旨在被字面理解，而是以隐喻的方式试图描述一个过于复杂和难以捉摸的现实，而这种现实无法用其他方式表达。这些关于神祇的戏剧性和引人入胜的故事，帮助人们表达了他们对环绕在他们周围的强大而无形力量的感知。

Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the “numinous” was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior. The numinous power was sensed by human beings in different ways—sometimes it inspired wild, bacchanalian excitement; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life. When people began to devise their myths and worship their gods, they were not seeking a literal explanation for natural phenomena. The symbolic stories, cave paintings and carvings were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives; indeed, poets, artists and musicians are often impelled by a similar desire today. In the Palaeolithic period, for example, when agriculture was developing, the cult of the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred. Artists carved those statues depicting her as a naked, pregnant woman which archaeologists have found all over Europe, the Middle East and India. The Great Mother remained imaginatively important for centuries. Like the old Sky God, she was absorbed into later pantheons and took her place alongside the older deities. She was usually one of the most powerful of the gods, certainly more powerful than the Sky God, who remained a rather shadowy figure. She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people. These myths were not intended to be taken literally, but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way. These dramatic and evocative stories of gods and goddesses helped people to articulate their sense of the powerful but unseen forces that surrounded them.

的确，在古代世界，人们似乎相信只有参与神圣的生活，才能真正成为人。尘世的生命显然脆弱不堪，终将走向死亡，但如果人们效仿神明的行为，就能在某种程度上分享神明更强大的力量和效力。因此，据说神明向人类展示了如何建造城市和神庙，而这些建筑不过是他们在神圣领域家园的复制品。神话中描绘的神圣世界，不仅是人们应该追求的理想，更是人类存在的原型；它是最初的模式或原型，我们尘世的生活正是以此为蓝本。世间万物皆是如此。人们认为凡物都是神圣世界中某种事物的复制品，这种观念影响了古代大多数文化的神话、仪式和社会组织，并且至今仍然影响着一些较为传统的社会。例如，在古代伊朗，世俗世界（ ^getik ）中的每一个人或物都被认为在神圣现实的原型世界（menok）中存在对应的存在。这种观点在现代社会中很难被我们理解，因为我们将自主和独立视为至高无上的人类价值。然而，那句著名的谚语“ post coitum omne animal tristis est ”（性交后，所有动物都感到悲伤）仍然表达了一种普遍的体验：在经历了一段激动人心、翘首以盼的时刻之后，我们常常感到自己错过了某种更伟大的东西，它似乎就在我们触手可及的范围内。模仿神灵仍然是一个重要的宗教概念：在安息日休息或在濯足节洗脚——这些行为本身并无意义——如今却变得意义非凡、神圣无比，因为人们相信它们曾经是神所行的。

Indeed, it seems that in the ancient world people believed that it was only by participating in this divine life that they would become truly human. Earthly life was obviously fragile and overshadowed by mortality, but if men and women imitated the actions of the gods they would share to some degree their greater power and effectiveness. Thus it was said that the gods had shown men how to build their cities and temples, which were mere copies of their own homes in the divine realm. The sacred world of the gods—as recounted in myth—was not just an ideal toward which men and women should aspire, but was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled. Everything on earth was thus believed to be a replica of something in the divine world, a perception that informed the mythology, ritual and social organization of most of the cultures of antiquity and continues to influence more traditional societies in our own day.¹ In ancient Iran, for example, every single person or object in the mundane world (getik) was held to have its counterpart in the archetypal world of sacred reality (menok). This is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, since we see autonomy and independence as supreme human values. Yet the famous tag post coitum omne animal tristis est still expresses a common experience: after an intense and eagerly anticipated moment, we often feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp. The imitation of a god is still an important religious notion: resting on the Sabbath or washing somebody’s feet on Maundy Thursday—actions that are meaningless in themselves—are now significant and sacred because people believe that they were once performed by God.

类似的精神信仰也曾是古代美索不达米亚世界的特征。底格里斯河-幼发拉底河流域，即今天的伊拉克境内，早在公元前4000年就居住着苏美尔人。他们建立了文明世界（Oikumene）最早的伟大文明之一。在他们的城市乌尔、埃雷克和基什，苏美尔人创造了楔形文字，建造了被称为金字形神塔的宏伟神庙，并发展出令人印象深刻的法律、文学和神话体系。不久之后，闪米特人阿卡德人入侵了该地区，并吸收了苏美尔人的语言和文化。后来，大约在公元前2000年，阿摩利人征服了苏美尔-阿卡德文明，并将巴比伦定为首都。最终，大约500年后，亚述人定居在附近的亚述，并在公元前8世纪征服了巴比伦。巴比伦的这一传统也影响了迦南的神话和宗教，迦南后来成为古代以色列人的应许之地。如同古代世界的其他民族一样，巴比伦人将他们的文化成就归功于神灵，认为神灵向他们的神话祖先揭示了自身的生活方式。因此，巴比伦本身被认为是天堂的象征，其每一座神庙都是天宫的复制品。这种与神圣世界的联系在盛大的新年庆典中得到庆祝和延续，该庆典在公元前17世纪已确立。在尼散月（即我们公元前的四月），巴比伦圣城举行了这一庆典，庄严地为国王加冕，并宣布其统治延续一年。然而，这种政治稳定只有在参与……的情况下才能维持。诸神统治更为持久有效，他们在创造世界之初便从混沌中带来秩序。因此，为期十一天的节日通过一系列仪式，将参与者从世俗时间中带入神圣永恒的神界。宰杀一只替罪羊以终结旧年；公开羞辱国王并拥立一位狂欢节国王取而代之，重现了最初的混沌；一场模拟战斗重演了诸神与毁灭力量的斗争。

A similar spirituality had characterized the ancient world of Mesopotamia. The Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is now Iraq, had been inhabited as early as 4000 BCE by the people known as the Sumerians, who had established one of the first great cultures of the Oikumene (the civilized world). In their cities of Ur, Erech and Kish, the Sumerians devised their cuneiform script, built the extraordinary temple-towers called ziggurats and evolved an impressive law, literature and mythology. Not long afterward the region was invaded by the Semitic Akkadians, who had adopted the language and culture of Sumer. Later still, in about 2000 BCE, the Amorites had conquered this Sumerian-Akkadian civilization and made Babylon their capital. Finally, some 500 years later, the Assyrians had settled in nearby Ashur and eventually conquered Babylon itself during the eighth century BCE. This Babylonian tradition also affected the mythology and religion of Canaan, which would become the Promised Land of the ancient Israelites. Like other people in the ancient world, the Babylonians attributed their cultural achievements to the gods, who had revealed their own lifestyle to their mythical ancestors. Thus Babylon itself was supposed to be an image of heaven, with each of its temples a replica of a celestial palace. This link with the divine world was celebrated and perpetuated annually in the great New Year Festival, which had been firmly established by the seventeenth century BCE. Celebrated in the holy city of Babylon during the month of Nisan—our April—the Festival solemnly enthroned the king and established his reign for another year. Yet this political stability could only endure insofar as it participated in the more enduring and effective government of the gods, who had brought order out of primordial chaos when they had created the world. The eleven sacred days of the Festival thus projected the participants outside profane time into the sacred and eternal world of the gods by means of ritual gestures. A scapegoat was killed to cancel the old, dying year; the public humiliation of the king and the enthronement of a carnival king in his place reproduced the original chaos; a mock battle reenacted the struggle of the gods against the forces of destruction.

因此，这些象征性的行为具有圣礼般的价值；它们使巴比伦人得以沉浸于神圣的力量或玛那之中，而他们伟大的文明正是建立在这种力量之上。人们认为文化是一种脆弱的成就，随时可能被混乱和瓦解的力量所吞噬。在节日的第四天下午，祭司和唱诗班成员列队进入至圣所，吟诵《埃努玛·埃利什》（Enuma Elish），这部史诗颂扬了诸神战胜混沌的胜利。这个故事并非对地球生命起源的客观描述，而是一种刻意的象征性尝试，旨在揭示一个伟大的奥秘并释放其神圣的力量。由于没有人亲身经历过这些难以想象的事件，因此对创世进行字面意义上的描述是不可能的：神话和象征成为描述它们的唯一恰当方式。简要地了解《埃努玛·埃利什》可以让我们对几个世纪后孕育我们自己的造物主上帝的精神有所了解。尽管圣经和古兰经中关于创世的记载最终会呈现出截然不同的形式，但这些奇异的神话从未完全消失，而是在很久以后，以一神论的语言重新进入了上帝的历史中。

These symbolic actions thus had a sacramental value; they enabled the people of Babylon to immerse themselves in the sacred power or mana on which their own great civilization depended. Culture was felt to be a fragile achievement, which could always fall prey to the forces of disorder and disintegration. On the afternoon of the fourth day of the Festival, priests and choristers filed into the Holy of Holies to recite the Enuma Elish, the epic poem which celebrated the victory of the gods over chaos. The story was not a factual account of the physical origins of life upon earth, but was a deliberately symbolic attempt to suggest a great mystery and to release its sacred power. A literal account of creation was impossible, since nobody had been present at these unimaginable events: myth and symbol were thus the only suitable way of describing them. A brief look at the Enuma Elish gives us some insight into the spirituality which gave birth to our own Creator God centuries later. Even though the biblical and Koranic account of creation would ultimately take a very different form, these strange myths never entirely disappeared, but would reenter the history of God at a much later date, clothed in a monotheistic idiom.

故事始于诸神的创造——正如我们将看到的，这一主题在犹太教和伊斯兰教的神秘主义中都非常重要。《埃努玛·埃利什》记载，起初，诸神成双成对地从一片无形的水状荒漠中诞生——这片荒漠本身就是神圣的物质。在巴比伦神话中——如同后来的《圣经》一样——不存在无中生有的创造，这种观念与古代世界格格不入。在诸神和人类出现之前，这种神圣的原材料早已亘古存在。当巴比伦人试图想象这种原始的神圣物质时，他们认为它一定类似于美索不达米亚的沼泽荒地，那里洪水不断，随时可能摧毁人类脆弱的造物。因此，在《埃努玛·埃利什》中，混沌并非炽热沸腾的物质，而是一种杂乱无章、毫无边界、定义和身份的混乱状态。

The story begins with the creation of the gods themselves—a theme which, as we shall see, would be very important in Jewish and Muslim mysticism. In the beginning, said the Enuma Elish, the gods emerged two by two from a formless, watery waste—a substance which was itself divine. In Babylonian myth—as later in the Bible—there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world. Before either the gods or human beings existed, this sacred raw material had existed from all eternity. When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, they thought that it must have been similar to the swampy wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men. In the Enuma Elish, chaos is not a fiery, seething mass, therefore, but a sloppy mess where everything lacks boundary, definition and identity:

随后，三位神祇从原始荒芜之地诞生：阿普苏（象征着河流的甘甜之水）、他的妻子提亚马特（象征着咸涩的海洋）以及穆姆，混沌之母。然而，这些神祇可以说是早期且不完善的原型，需要进一步完善。“阿普苏”和“提亚马特”这两个名字可以翻译为“深渊”、“虚空”或“无底之海”。他们与最初的混沌状态一样，都处于无形的惰性之中，尚未形成清晰的自身形态。

Then three gods did emerge from the primal wasteland: Apsu (identified with the sweet waters of the rivers), his wife, Tiamat (the salty sea), and Mummu, the Womb of chaos. Yet these gods were, so to speak, an early, inferior model which needed improvement. The names “Apsu” and “Tiamat” can be translated “abyss,” “void” or “bottomless gulf.” They share the shapeless inertia of the original formlessness and had not yet achieved a clear identity.

因此，一系列其他神祇从他们之中涌现出来，这一过程被称为“流溢”，它在我们自己的神的历史中变得至关重要。新神祇成对出现，彼此交融，随着神圣演化的进行，每一位神祇的形象都比前一位更加鲜明。首先出现的是拉赫穆和拉赫曼（他们的名字意为“淤泥”：水与土仍然混杂在一起）。接下来是安舍尔和基沙尔，他们分别代表天空和海洋的地平线。然后是阿努（天空）和埃阿（大地），似乎完成了这一过程。神圣的世界拥有天空、河流和大地，彼此独立，泾渭分明。但创造才刚刚开始：混沌和瓦解的力量只能通过痛苦而持续的斗争才能被遏制。年轻而充满活力的神祇们起来反抗他们的父母，但即使埃阿能够战胜阿普苏和穆姆，他也无法对抗提亚马特，后者创造了一大群畸形怪物为她而战。幸运的是，埃阿也拥有一个杰出的孩子：太阳神马尔杜克，他是神族血脉中最完美的化身。在众神大会上，马尔杜克承诺与提亚马特战斗，条件是成为众神的统治者。然而，他费尽九牛二虎之力，经过一场漫长而危险的战斗，才最终击败了提亚马特。在这个神话中，创造力是一场艰苦卓绝的斗争，是在绝对劣势下艰难取得的成果。

Consequently, a succession of other gods emerged from them in a process known as emanation, which would become very important in the history of our own God. The new gods emerged, one from the other, in pairs, each of which had acquired a greater definition than the last as the divine evolution progressed. First came Lahmu and Lahamn (their names mean “silt”: water and earth are still mixed together). Next came Ansher and Kishar, identified respectively with the horizons of sky and sea. Then Anu (the heavens) and Ea (the earth) arrived and seemed to complete the process. The divine world had sky, rivers and earth, distinct and separate from one another. But creation had only just begun: the forces of chaos and disintegration could only be held at bay by means of a painful and incessant struggle. The younger, dynamic gods rose up against their parents, but even though Ea was able to overpower Apsu and Mummu, he could make no headway against Tiamat, who produced a whole brood of misshapen monsters to fight on her behalf. Fortunately Ea had a wonderful child of his own: Marduk, the Sun God, the most perfect specimen of the divine line. At a meeting of the Great Assembly of gods, Marduk promised to fight Tiamat on condition that he became their ruler. Yet he only managed to slay Tiamat with great difficulty and after a long, dangerous battle. In this myth, creativity is a struggle, achieved laboriously against overwhelming odds.

然而，最终，马尔杜克站在提亚马特巨大的尸体旁，决定创造一个新世界：他将提亚马特的尸体一分为二，形成天空的拱顶和人间；接着，他制定了维持万物各就各位的法则。秩序必须建立。然而，胜利并不彻底。它需要通过特殊的祭祀仪式，年复一年地重建。因此，众神聚集在新世界的中心——巴比伦，建造了一座神庙，用于举行天上的祭祀仪式。仪式得以举行。其成果是为纪念马尔杜克而建的宏伟金字形神塔，“尘世的圣殿，无限天堂的象征”。神塔建成后，马尔杜克登上塔顶，众神齐声高呼：“这就是巴比伦，神之城，您挚爱的家园！”随后，他们举行了祭祀仪式，“宇宙由此获得其结构，隐秘的世界由此显现，众神也由此在宇宙中各得其所。” ^³这些法则和仪式对所有人具有约束力；即使是神祇也必须遵守，以确保宇宙的延续。这个神话表达了巴比伦人眼中文明的内在意义。他们非常清楚自己的祖先建造了这座金字形神塔，但《埃努玛·埃利什》的故事阐明了他们的信念：他们的创造事业只有汲取神力才能永存。他们在新年庆祝的祭祀仪式早在人类出现之前就已经存在：它被写入万物本质，即使是神祇也必须服从。这个神话也表达了他们坚信巴比伦是圣地，是世界的中心，是众神的居所——这一观念在古代几乎所有宗教体系中都至关重要。圣城的概念，即男女老少都感到自己与神圣的力量、万物存在和效力的源泉紧密相连，在我们各自的上帝所信奉的三大一神论宗教中都占据着重要地位。

Eventually, however, Marduk stood over Tiamat’s vast corpse and decided to create a new world: he split her body in two to form the arch of the sky and the world of men; next he devised the laws that would keep everything in its appointed place. Order must be achieved. Yet the victory was not complete. It had to be reestablished, by means of a special liturgy, year after year. Consequently the gods met at Babylon, the center of the new earth, and built a temple where the celestial rites could be performed. The result was the great ziggurat in honor of Marduk, “the earthly temple, symbol of infinite heaven.” When it was completed, Marduk took his seat at the summit and the gods cried aloud: “This is Babylon, dear city of the god, your beloved home!” Then they performed the liturgy “from which the universe receives its structure, the hidden world is made plain and the gods assigned their places in the universe.”³ These laws and rituals are binding upon everybody; even the gods must observe them to ensure the survival of creation. The myth expresses the inner meaning of civilization, as the Babylonians saw it. They knew perfectly well that their own ancestors had built the ziggurat, but the story of the Enuma Elish articulated their belief that their creative enterprise could only endure if it partook of the power of the divine. The liturgy they celebrated at the New Year had been devised before human beings had come into existence: it was written into the very nature of things, to which even the gods had to submit. The myth also expressed their conviction that Babylon was a sacred place, the center of the world and the home of the gods—a notion that was crucial in almost all the religious systems of antiquity. The idea of a holy city, where men and women felt that they were closely in touch with sacred power, the source of all being and efficacy, would be important in all three of the monotheistic religions of our own God.

最后，几乎像是事后才想起似的，马尔杜克创造了人类。他抓住了金古（提亚马特的愚钝配偶，是提亚马特在阿普苏战败后创造的），杀死了他，然后将神血与尘土混合，塑造了第一个人。众神目睹了这一切，既惊奇又钦佩。然而，这个关于人类起源的神话故事中却带有一丝幽默，它绝非创世的巅峰之作，而是出自一位最愚蠢、最无能的神祇之手。但这个故事也阐明了另一个重要的观点。第一个人是由神的物质创造的：因此，他拥有神性，尽管这种神性是有限的。人类与神之间并不存在鸿沟。自然界、人类以及神祇本身都拥有相同的本质，都源自相同的神圣物质。这种异教的视角是整体性的。神祇并非与人类隔绝在一个独立的本体论领域：神性与人性本质上并无不同。因此，无需神明的特殊启示，也无需神圣法则自天而降。神与人面临着同样的困境，唯一的区别在于神拥有更强大的力量和永生。

Finally, almost as an afterthought, Marduk created humanity. He seized Kingu (the oafish consort of Tiamat, created by her after the defeat of Apsu), slew him and shaped the first man by mixing the divine blood with the dust. The gods watched in astonishment and admiration. There is, however, some humor in this mythical account of the origin of humanity, which is by no means the pinnacle of creation but derives from one of the most stupid and ineffectual of the gods. But the story made another important point. The first man had been created from the substance of a god: he therefore shared the divine nature, in however limited a way. There was no gulf between human beings and the gods. The natural world, men and women and the gods themselves all shared the same nature and derived from the same divine substance. The pagan vision was holistic. The gods were not shut off from the human race in a separate, ontological sphere: divinity was not essentially different from humanity. There was thus no need for a special revelation of the gods or for a divine law to descend to earth from on high. The gods and human beings shared the same predicament, the only difference being that the gods were more powerful and were immortal.

这种整体性的视野并非中东独有，而是普遍存在的。在古代世界，公元前六世纪，品达在他的奥林匹克运动会颂歌中表达了希腊人对这种信念的看法：

This holistic vision was not confined to the Middle East but was common in the ancient world. In the sixth century BCE, Pindar expressed the Greek version of this belief in his ode on the Olympic games:

品达并没有将运动员视为各自为战、力求突破个人极限的个体，而是将他们与神祇的功绩相比较，因为神祇是人类一切成就的典范。人类并非盲目地模仿遥不可及的神祇，而是充分发挥自身与生俱来的神性潜能。

Instead of seeing his athletes as on their own, each striving to achieve his personal best, Pindar sets them against the exploits of the gods, who were the pattern for all human achievement. Men were not slavishly imitating the gods as hopelessly distant beings but living up to the potential of their own essentially divine nature.

马尔杜克和提亚马特的神话似乎影响了迦南人，他们讲述了一个非常相似的故事，讲述的是风暴和丰饶之神巴力·哈巴德，他在《圣经》中经常被描述得极其不堪。巴力与海洋和河流之神亚姆·纳哈尔的战斗故事记载在公元前十四世纪的泥板上。巴力和亚姆都与迦南至高神埃尔同住。在埃尔的会议上，亚姆要求将巴力交给他。巴力用两件魔法武器击败了亚姆，正要杀死他时，埃尔的妻子、众神之母亚舍拉恳求说，杀死俘虏是不光彩的。巴力感到羞愧，饶恕了亚姆。亚姆代表着海洋和河流的敌对一面，它们不断威胁着要淹没大地，而巴力，这位风暴之神，则使大地肥沃。在另一个版本的神话中，巴力杀死了七头巨龙洛坦（希伯来语称之为利维坦）。在几乎所有文化中，巨龙都象征着潜在的、未成形的和未分化的。巴力以真正具有创造性的行为阻止了万物滑向原始无形状态，并因此获得了众神为他建造的华丽宫殿作为奖赏。因此，在早期宗教中，创造力被视为神圣的：我们至今仍使用宗教语言来谈论创造性的“灵感”，这种灵感重塑了现实，并为世界带来了新的意义。

The myth of Marduk and Tiamat seems to have influenced the people of Canaan, who told a very similar story about Baal-Habad, the god of storm and fertility, who is often mentioned in extremely unflattering terms in the Bible. The story of Baal’s battle with Yam-Nahar, the god of the seas and rivers, is told on tablets that date to the fourteenth century BCE. Baal and Yam both lived with El, the Canaanite High God. At the Council of El, Yam demands that Baal be delivered up to him. With two magic weapons, Baal defeats Yam and is about to kill him when Asherah (El’s wife and mother of the gods) pleads that it is dishonorable to slay a prisoner. Baal is ashamed and spares Yam, who represents the hostile aspect of the seas and rivers which constantly threaten to flood the earth, while Baal, the Storm God, makes the earth fertile. In another version of the myth, Baal slays the seven-headed dragon Lotan, who is called Leviathan in Hebrew. In almost all cultures, the dragon symbolizes the latent, the unformed and the undifferentiated. Baal has thus halted the slide back to primal formlessness in a truly creative act and is rewarded by a beautiful palace built by the gods in his honor. In very early religion, therefore, creativity was seen as divine: we still use religious language to speak of creative “inspiration” which shapes reality anew and brings fresh meaning to the world.

但巴力的命运却发生了逆转：他死了，不得不下凡到死亡与不育之神莫特的地盘。当他听到儿子的遭遇时，至高神埃尔从宝座上下来，披上麻衣，划破双颊，却无力赎回他的儿子。巴力的爱人兼妹妹阿纳特离开了神圣的领域，去寻找她的灵魂伴侣，“如同母牛渴望小牛犊，母羊渴望羔羊般渴望他”。⁵^当她找到巴力的遗体时，她为他举行了盛大的葬礼，抓住莫特，用剑劈开他，扬谷、焚烧、研磨，如同碾碎玉米一般，然后播种在土地里。其他伟大的女神——伊南娜、伊什塔尔和伊西斯——也有类似的传说，她们寻找死去的巴力，为大地带来新的生命。然而，阿纳特的胜利必须通过年复一年的仪式庆典来延续。后来——由于史料不全，我们无法确定具体过程——巴力复活了，并归还给了阿纳特。这种以两性结合为象征的完整与和谐的极致体现，在古代迦南以仪式性性爱来庆祝。通过这种方式模仿神祇，男女共同对抗不孕不育，确保世界的创造力和繁衍。神祇之死、女神的寻觅以及最终凯旋回归神圣领域，是许多文化中永恒的宗教主题，并在犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教所崇拜的独一真神的不同宗教中反复出现。

But Baal undergoes a reverse: he dies and has to descend to the world of Mot, the god of death and sterility. When he hears of his son’s fate, the High God El comes down from his throne, puts on sackcloth and gashes his cheeks, but he cannot redeem his son. It is Anat, Baal’s lover and sister, who leaves the divine realm and goes in search of her twin soul, “desiring him as a cow her calf or a ewe her lamb.”⁵ When she finds his body, she makes a funeral feast in his honor, seizes Mot, cleaves him with her sword, winnows, burns and grinds him like corn before sowing him in the ground. Similar stories are told about the other great goddesses—Inana, Ishtar and Isis—who search for the dead god and bring new life to the soil. The victory of Anat, however, must be perpetuated year after year in ritual celebration. Later—we are not sure how, since our sources are incomplete—Baal is brought back to life and restored to Anat. This apotheosis of wholeness and harmony, symbolized by the union of the sexes, was celebrated by means of ritual sex in ancient Canaan. By imitating the gods in this way, men and women would share their struggle against sterility and ensure the creativity and fertility of the world. The death of a god, the quest of the goddess and the triumphant return to the divine sphere were constant religious themes in many cultures and would recur in the very different religion of the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

《圣经》中将这种宗教归于亚伯拉罕，他离开吾珥，最终在公元前20世纪至19世纪之间的某个时期定居迦南。我们没有亚伯拉罕的同代记载，但学者们认为他可能是公元前三千年末带领族人从美索不达米亚迁徙到地中海沿岸的游牧首领之一。这些游牧者，在美索不达米亚和埃及的文献中被称为阿比鲁（Abiru）、阿皮鲁（Apiru）或哈比鲁（Habiru），讲西闪米特语，希伯来语是其中之一。他们并非像贝都因人那样，随着季节的更迭带着牲畜迁徙的沙漠游牧民族，而是更难以归类，因此经常与保守的统治者发生冲突。他们的文化地位通常高于沙漠居民。有些人成为雇佣兵，有些人成为政府官员，有些人则从事商人、仆人或修补匠的工作。有些人变得富有，并可能试图购置土地定居下来。 《创世记》中关于亚伯拉罕的故事表明，他曾作为雇佣兵为所多玛王效力，并描述了他与迦南及其周边地区的统治者之间频繁的冲突。最终，当他的妻子撒拉去世后，亚伯拉罕在希伯伦（今约旦河西岸）购买了一块土地。

This religion is attributed in the Bible to Abraham, who left Ur and eventually settled in Canaan some time between the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE. We have no contemporary record of Abraham, but scholars think that he may have been one of the wandering chieftains who had led their people from Mesopotamia toward the Mediterranean at the end of the third millennium BCE. These wanderers, some of whom are called Abiru, Apiru or Habiru in Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources, spoke West Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is one. They were not regular desert nomads like the Bedouin, who migrated with their flocks according to the cycle of the seasons, but were more difficult to classify and, as such, were frequently in conflict with the conservative authorities. Their cultural status was usually superior to that of the desert folk. Some served as mercenaries, others became government employees, others worked as merchants, servants or tinkers. Some became rich and might then try to acquire land and settle down. The stories about Abraham in the Book of Genesis show him serving the King of Sodom as a mercenary and describe his frequent conflicts with the authorities of Canaan and its environs. Eventually, when his wife, Sarah, died, Abraham bought land in Hebron, now on the West Bank.

《创世记》中关于亚伯拉罕及其直系后裔的记载可能表明，早期希伯来人的定居经历了三个主要阶段。迦南，即今天的以色列。第一次移民潮与亚伯拉罕和希伯伦有关，大约发生在公元前1850年。第二次移民潮与亚伯拉罕的孙子雅各有关，他后来改名为以色列（意为“愿上帝彰显他的力量！”）。他定居在示剑，也就是现在约旦河西岸的阿拉伯城市纳布卢斯。圣经记载，雅各的儿子们，也就是以色列十二支派的祖先，在迦南遭遇严重饥荒期间迁往埃及。第三次希伯来人定居潮发生在公元前1200年左右，当时一些自称是亚伯拉罕后裔的部落从埃及来到迦南。他们说自己曾被埃及人奴役，但被一位名叫耶和华的神解放，耶和华是他们领袖摩西的神。他们强行进入迦南后，与当地的希伯来人结盟，并被称为以色列人。圣经清楚地表明，我们所知的古代以色列人是由多个民族组成的联盟，他们主要因对摩西的上帝耶和华的忠诚而团结在一起。然而，圣经的记载是在几个世纪之后，大约公元前八世纪才写成的，尽管它无疑借鉴了更早的叙事资料。

The Genesis account of Abraham and his immediate descendants may indicate that there were three main waves of early Hebrew settlement in Canaan, the modern Israel. One was associated with Abraham and Hebron and took place in about 1850 BCE. A second wave of immigration was linked with Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel (“May God show his strength!”); he settled in Shechem, which is now the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank. The Bible tells us that Jacob’s sons, who became the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, emigrated to Egypt during a severe famine in Canaan. The third wave of Hebrew settlement occurred in about 1200 BCE when tribes who claimed to be descendants of Abraham arrived in Canaan from Egypt. They said that they had been enslaved by the Egyptians but had been liberated by a deity called Yahweh, who was the god of their leader, Moses. After they had forced their way into Canaan, they allied themselves with the Hebrews there and became known as the people of Israel. The Bible makes it clear that the people we know as the ancient Israelites were a confederation of various ethnic groups, bound together principally by their loyalty to Yahweh, the God of Moses. The biblical account was written down centuries later, however, in about the eighth century BCE, though it certainly drew on earlier narrative sources.

十九世纪，一些德国圣经学者发展出一种批判方法，从圣经的前五卷书——创世记、出埃及记、利未记、民数记和申命记——中辨别出四个不同的来源。这些来源后来在公元前五世纪被汇编成我们今天所知的摩西五经。这种批判方法曾饱受诟病，但至今无人提出更令人满意的理论来解释为何圣经中一些关键事件（例如创世和洪水）存在两种截然不同的记载，以及为何圣经有时会自相矛盾。最早的两位圣经作者，他们的作品分别记载于创世记和出埃及记中，很可能是在公元八世纪写作的，尽管有些人认为他们的写作时间更早。其中一位被称为“J”，因为他称他的上帝为“耶和华”（Yahweh）；另一位被称为“E”，因为他更倾向于使用更正式的神名“以罗欣”（Elohim）。到了公元八世纪，以色列人已经将迦南地分裂成两个王国。 J 写作于南方的犹大王国，而 E 则来自北方的以色列王国。（参见本页地图。）我们将在第 2 章讨论五经的另外两个来源——申命记 (D) 和祭司 (P) 对以色列古代历史的记载。

During the nineteenth century, some German biblical scholars developed a critical method which discerned four different sources in the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These were later collated into the final text of what we know as the Pentateuch during the fifth century BCE. This form of criticism has come in for a good deal of harsh treatment, but nobody has yet come up with a more satisfactory theory which explains why there are two quite different accounts of key biblical events, such as the Creation and the Flood, and why the Bible sometimes contradicts itself. The two earliest biblical authors, whose work is found in Genesis and Exodus, were probably writing during the eighth century, though some would give them an earlier date. One is known as “J” because he calls his God “Yahweh,” the other “E” since he prefers to use the more formal divine title “Elohim.” By the eighth century, the Israelites had divided Canaan into two separate kingdoms. J was writing in the southern Kingdom of Judah, while E came from the northern Kingdom of Israel. (See map this page.) We will discuss the two other sources of the Pentateuch—the Deuteronomist (D) and Priestly (P) accounts of the ancient history of Israel—in Chapter 2.

我们将看到，在许多方面，J 和 E 都与他们在中东的邻居有着相似的宗教观点，但他们的记载确实表明，到了公元前八世纪，以色列人开始……他们各自发展出独特的见解。例如，J 在他的上帝史中，以创世记述开篇，与《埃努玛·埃利什》相比，其描述显得异常敷衍：

We shall see that in many respects both J and E shared the religious perspectives of their neighbors in the Middle East, but their accounts do show that by the eighth century BCE, the Israelites were beginning to develop a distinct vision of their own. J, for example, starts his history of God with an account of the creation of the world which, compared with the Enuma Elish, is startlingly perfunctory:

这完全是一种全新的尝试。与美索不达米亚和迦南的异教徒同代人专注于世界起源和史前时期不同，J更关注普通的历史时期。直到公元前六世纪，以色列才真正开始关注创世，当时我们称之为“P”的作者写下了他那宏伟的记载，即如今的《创世记》第一章。J并没有明确指出耶和华是天地万物的唯一创造者。然而，最引人注目的是J对人与神之间某种区别的理解。人（亚当）并非像他的神一样由同样的神圣物质构成，而是属于大地（亚当），正如双关语所暗示的那样。

This was an entirely new departure. Instead of concentrating on the creation of the world and on the prehistoric period like his pagan contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Canaan, J is more interested in ordinary historical time. There would be no real interest in creation in Israel until the sixth century BCE, when the author whom we call “P” wrote his majestic account in what is now the first chapter of Genesis. J is not absolutely clear that Yahweh is the sole creator of heaven and earth. Most noticeable, however, is J’s perception of a certain distinction between man and the divine. Instead of being composed of the same divine stuff as his god, man (adam), as the pun indicates, belongs to the earth (adamah).

与他的异教邻居不同，J并不认为世俗历史与神圣的、原始的神祇时代相比是亵渎、软弱和虚无的。他匆匆略过史前时期的事件，直到神话时期结束，其中包括诸如洪水和巴别塔的故事，然后进入以色列民族历史的开端。这在第12章中戛然而止，亚伯兰（后来改名为亚伯拉罕，意为“多国之父”）奉耶和华之命离开他在哈兰（今土耳其东部）的家人，迁往地中海附近的迦南。我们得知，他的父亲他拉，一个异教徒，已经带着家人从吾珥向西迁徙。耶和华告诉亚伯拉罕，他肩负着特殊的使命：他将成为强大民族的始祖，这个民族的人口将来会比天上的繁星还要多；他的后裔将来会拥有迦南地。J 对亚伯拉罕蒙召的描述，为这位神未来的历史定下了基调。在古代近东，人们通过仪式和神话来体验神圣的玛那。人们并不期望马尔杜克、巴力和阿纳特介入信徒们平凡的世俗生活：他们的行为是……在神圣的时刻，上帝施行神迹。然而，以色列的上帝却在现实世界的当下事件中彰显祂的力量。祂在此时此地以命令的形式显现。祂的首次启示便是一条诫命：亚伯拉罕要离开他的族人，前往迦南地。

Unlike his pagan neighbors, J does not dismiss mundane history as profane, feeble and insubstantial compared with the sacred, primordial time of the gods. He hurries through the events of prehistory until he comes to the end of the mythical period, which includes such stories as the Flood and the Tower of Babel, and arrives at the start of the history of the people of Israel. This begins abruptly in Chapter 12 when the man Abram, who will later be renamed Abraham (“Father of a Multitude”), is commanded by Yahweh to leave his family in Haran, in what is now eastern Turkey, and migrate to Canaan near the Mediterranean Sea. We have been told that his father, Terah, a pagan, had already migrated westward with his family from Ur. Now Yahweh tells Abraham that he has a special destiny: he will become the father of a mighty nation that will one day be more numerous than the stars in the sky, and one day his descendants will possess the land of Canaan as their own. J’s account of the call of Abraham sets the tone for the future history of this God. In the ancient Middle East, the divine mana was experienced in ritual and myth. Marduk, Baal and Anat were not expected to involve themselves in the ordinary, profane lives of their worshippers: their actions had been performed in sacred time. The God of Israel, however, made his power effective in current events in the real world. He was experienced as an imperative in the here and now. His first revelation of himself consists of a command: Abraham is to leave his people and travel to the land of Canaan.

但耶和华究竟是谁？亚伯拉罕敬拜的神与摩西敬拜的是同一位神吗？还是他以不同的名字认识这位神？这在今天对我们而言至关重要，但圣经对此却语焉不详，给出的答案也相互矛盾。J说，自亚当的孙子时代起，人们就一直在敬拜耶和华；但在公元前六世纪，P似乎暗示以色列人直到耶和华在燃烧的荆棘丛中向摩西显现之前，从未听说过他。P让耶和华解释说，他实际上就是亚伯拉罕的神，仿佛这是一个颇具争议的观点：他告诉摩西，亚伯拉罕称他为^“全能的神”（El Shaddai），并不知道神的名字是耶和华。7这种矛盾似乎并没有让圣经的作者或编者们感到过分担忧。J在整部圣经中都称他的神^为“耶和华”：在他写作的时代，耶和华是以色列的神，而这才是最重要的。以色列人的宗教务实，不太关注那些令我们担忧的推测性细节。然而，我们不应想当然地认为亚伯拉罕或摩西对他们的神有与我们今天相同的信仰。我们对圣经故事和以色列后来的历史如此熟悉，以至于我们倾向于将我们对后期犹太宗教的了解投射到这些早期历史人物身上。因此，我们假定以色列的三位族长——亚伯拉罕、他的儿子以撒和他的孙子雅各——都是一神论者，他们只信仰一位神。但事实似乎并非如此。实际上，称这些早期希伯来人为异教徒可能更为准确，因为他们与迦南邻居的许多宗教信仰相似。他们当然会相信马尔杜克、巴力和阿纳特等神祇的存在。他们可能并非都崇拜同一位神：亚伯拉罕的神、以撒的“敬畏者”或“至亲”以及雅各的“大能者”很可能是三位不同的神^。

But who is Yahweh? Did Abraham worship the same God as Moses or did he know him by a different name? This would be a matter of prime importance to us today, but the Bible seems curiously vague on the subject and gives conflicting answers to this question. J says that men had worshipped Yahweh ever since the time of Adam’s grandson, but in the sixth century, P seems to suggest that the Israelites had never heard of Yahweh until he appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush. P makes Yahweh explain that he really was the same God as the God of Abraham, as though this were a rather controversial notion: he tells Moses that Abraham had called him ^“El Shaddai” and did not know the divine name Yahweh.⁷ The discrepancy does not seem to worry either the biblical writers or their editors unduly. J calls his god “Yahweh” throughout: by the time he was writing, Yahweh was the God of Israel and that was all that mattered. Israelite religion was pragmatic and less concerned with the kind of speculative detail that would worry us. Yet we should not assume that either Abraham or Moses believed in their God as we do today. We are so familiar with the Bible story and the subsequent history of Israel that we tend to project our knowledge of later Jewish religion back onto these early historical personages. Accordingly, we assume that the three patriarchs of Israel—Abraham, his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob—were monotheists, that they believed in only one God. This does not seem to have been the case. Indeed, it is probably more accurate to call these early Hebrews pagans who shared many of the religious beliefs of their neighbors in Canaan. They would certainly have believed in the existence of such deities as Marduk, Baal and Anat. They may not all have worshipped the same deity: it is possible that the God of Abraham, the “Fear” or “Kinsman” of Isaac and the “Mighty One” of Jacob were three separate gods.⁸

我们还可以进一步探讨。亚伯拉罕的神极有可能就是迦南的至高神埃尔（El）。这位神以“全能的埃尔”（El Shaddai，意为“山之埃尔”）的身份向亚伯拉罕显现，这是埃尔的传统称号之一。 ⁹ 在其他经文中，他也被称为“至高神埃尔”（El Elyon）或“伯特利的埃尔”（El of Bethel）。迦南至高神的名字保留在诸如“以色列埃尔”（Isra-El）或“以实玛利埃尔”（Ishma-El）等希伯来语名字中。他们对埃尔的体验方式，对于中东的异教徒来说并不陌生。我们稍后会详细阐述。几个世纪后，以色列人发现耶和华的“玛那”（ mana，意为“神圣”）令人恐惧。例如，在西奈山上，耶和华会在令人敬畏的火山爆发中向摩西显现，以色列人不得不与他保持距离。相比之下，亚伯拉罕的神埃尔（El）则是一位非常温和的神。他以朋友的身份出现在亚伯拉罕面前，有时甚至会化作人形。这种被称为“显现”（epiphany）的神圣显灵在古代异教世界十分常见。尽管人们通常认为神不会直接干预凡人的生活，但在神话时代，某些特权阶层却能与神面对面相遇。《伊利亚特》中充满了这样的显现。在希腊人和特洛伊人的梦境中，神灵会显现，因为人们相信，在梦中，人间与神界的界限会变得模糊。在《伊利亚特》的结尾，普里阿摩斯被一位英俊的年轻人引到希腊船只旁，这位年轻人最终显露真身，原来是赫尔墨斯。10^当希腊人回望他们英雄的黄金时代时，他们感到自己曾与神灵有过密切的接触，毕竟，神灵与人类本质上并无二致。这些关于神迹显现的故事表达了整体性的异教观念：当神性与自然或人性没有本质区别时，人们便可以在不经意间体验到它的存在。世界充满了神灵，人们可以随时随地、在任何角落，甚至在路过的陌生人身上意外地感知到他们的存在。似乎普通民众也相信，在自己的生活中，这样的神圣邂逅是可能的：这或许可以解释《使徒行传》中那个奇特的故事：公元一世纪，使徒保罗和他的门徒巴拿巴在如今的土耳其境内的吕斯特拉城，竟然被当地人误认为是宙斯和赫尔墨斯^。11

We can go further. It is highly likely that Abraham’s God was El, the High God of Canaan. The deity introduces himself to Abraham as El Shaddai (El of the Mountain), which was one of El’s traditional titles.⁹ Elsewhere he is called El Elyon (The Most High God) or El of Bethel. The name of the Canaanite High God is preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El. They experienced him in ways that would not have been unfamiliar to the pagans of the Middle East. We shall see that centuries later Israelites found the mana or “holiness” of Yahweh a terrifying experience. On Mount Sinai, for example, he would appear to Moses in the midst of an awe-inspiring volcanic eruption, and the Israelites had to keep their distance. In comparison, Abraham’s god El is a very mild deity. He appears to Abraham as a friend and sometimes even assumes human form. This type of divine apparition, known as an epiphany, was quite common in the pagan world of antiquity. Even though in general the gods were not expected to intervene directly in the lives of mortal men and women, certain privileged individuals in mythical times had encountered their gods face to face. The Iliad is full of such epiphanies. The gods and goddesses appear to both Greeks and Trojans in dreams, when the boundary between the human and divine worlds was believed to be lowered. At the very end of the Iliad, Priam is guided to the Greek ships by a charming young man who finally reveals himself as Hermes.¹⁰ When the Greeks looked back to the golden age of their heroes, they felt that they had been closely in touch with the gods, who were, after all, of the same nature as human beings. These stories of epiphanies expressed the holistic pagan vision: when the divine was not essentially distinct from either nature or humanity, it could be experienced without great fanfare. The world was full of gods, who could be perceived unexpectedly at any time, around any corner or in the person of a passing stranger. It seems that ordinary folk may have believed that such divine encounters were possible in their own lives: this may explain the strange story in the Acts of the Apostles when, as late as the first century CE, the apostle Paul and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the people of Lystra in what is now Turkey.¹¹

同样，当以色列人回顾他们的黄金时代时，他们看到亚伯拉罕、以撒和雅各与他们的神关系亲密。神以勒像任何一位酋长或首领一样，给予他们友好的建议：他指引他们的旅程，告诉他们该娶谁为妻，并在梦中与他们交谈。他们有时似乎能看到他以人的形象出现——这种想法后来被以色列人视为禁忌。在《创世记》第18章中，J告诉我们，神在希伯仑附近的幔利橡树旁向亚伯拉罕显现。亚伯拉罕抬头望去，发现三个陌生人在一天中最热的时候走向他的帐篷。他以典型的中东式礼貌，坚持让他们坐下休息，自己则赶紧去准备食物。在交谈中，很自然地，其中一人正是他的神，J总是称他为“耶和华”。另外两人原来是天使。似乎没有人对这个启示感到特别惊讶。在J写作的时候，公元前八世纪，没有哪个以色列人会想到会以这种方式“见到”上帝：大多数人都会觉得这令人震惊。J 的同代人“E”认为关于先祖与上帝亲密关系的古老故事有失体面：当 E 讲述亚伯拉罕或雅各与上帝的交往时，他倾向于拉开事件的距离，使古老的传说不那么拟人化。因此，他会说上帝通过天使与亚伯拉罕对话。然而，J 并没有这种顾虑，在他的叙述中保留了这些原始启示的古老韵味。

In much the same way, when the Israelites looked back to their own golden age, they saw Abraham, Isaac and Jacob living on familiar terms with their god. El gives them friendly advice, like any sheikh or chieftain: he guides their wanderings, tells them whom to marry and speaks to them in dreams. Occasionally they seem to see him in human form—an idea that would later be anathema to the Israelites. In Chapter 18 of Genesis, J tells us that God appeared to Abraham by the oak tree of Mamre, near Hebron. Abraham had looked up and noticed three strangers approaching his tent during the hottest part of the day. With typical Middle Eastern courtesy, he insisted that they sit down and rest while he hurried to prepare food for them. In the course of conversation, it transpired, quite naturally, that one of these men was none other than his god, whom J always calls “Yahweh.” The other two men turn out to be angels. Nobody seems particularly surprised by this revelation. By the time J was writing in the eighth century BCE, no Israelite would have expected to “see” God in this way: most would have found it a shocking notion. J’s contemporary, “E,” finds the old stories about the patriarchs’ intimacy with God unseemly: when E tells stories about Abraham’s or Jacob’s dealings with God, he prefers to distance the event and make the old legends less anthropomorphic. Thus he will say that God speaks to Abraham through an angel. J, however, does not share this squeamishness and preserves the ancient flavor of these primitive epiphanies in his account.

雅各也经历过多次顿悟。有一次，他决定返回哈兰，在亲戚中寻找妻子。在旅程的第一段，他睡在约旦河谷附近的卢斯，枕着一块石头。那天晚上，他梦见一架天梯，连接着天地：天使在神界和人界之间上下穿梭。我们不禁想起马尔杜克的塔顶：在塔顶，仿佛悬于天地之间，人们可以与神相遇。在自己天梯的顶端，雅各梦见了神伊勒，神伊勒祝福他，并重申了他对亚伯拉罕的承诺：雅各的后裔将成为一个强大的民族，拥有迦南地。正如我们将看到的，神伊勒还许下了一个对雅各影响深远的承诺。异教信仰往往带有地域性：神只在特定的区域拥有管辖权，因此，出国旅行时，敬拜当地的神灵总是明智之举。但以勒向雅各承诺，当他离开迦南，在异乡漂泊时，他会保护他：“我与你同在；无论你往哪里去，我必保佑你。” ¹²这则早期启示的故事表明，迦南的至高神开始具有更普世的意义。

Jacob also experienced a number of epiphanies. On one occasion, he had decided to return to Haran to find a wife among his relatives there. On the first leg of his journey, he slept at Luz near the Jordan valley, using a stone as a pillow. That night he dreamed of a ladder which stretched between earth and heaven: angels were going up and down between the realms of god and man. We cannot but be reminded of Marduk’s ziggurat: on its summit, suspended as it were between heaven and earth, a man could meet his gods. At the top of his own ladder, Jacob dreamed that he saw El, who blessed him and repeated the promises that he had made to Abraham: Jacob’s descendants would become a mighty nation and possess the land of Canaan. He also made a promise that made a significant impression on Jacob, as we shall see. Pagan religion was often territorial: a god had jurisdiction only in a particular area, and it was always wise to worship the local deities when you went abroad. But El promised Jacob that he would protect him when he left Canaan and wandered in a strange land: “I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go.”¹² The story of this early epiphany shows that the High God of Canaan was beginning to acquire a more universal implication.

雅各醒来后，意识到自己竟在不知不觉中身处一处圣地，那里曾是人们与神灵对话的地方。“耶和华真在这里，我竟不知道！”他说道。他心中充满了异教徒在面对神圣力量时常有的惊奇：“这地方何等令人敬畏！这简直就是神的殿（伯特利），这是通往天堂的门。” ¹³ 他本能地用当时文化中的宗教语言表达了自己的感受：巴比伦城，众神的居所，就被称为“众神之门”（巴比伦）。雅各决定按照当地传统的异教习俗，将这片圣地分别为圣。他拿起自己曾枕过的石头，将其翻转过来，用油奠祭，使之圣化。从此，这地方不再叫路斯，而是伯特利，即“以勒的殿”。立石是迦南人生育崇拜的常见特征，我们将会看到，这种崇拜在伯特利一直兴盛到公元前八世纪。公元前10世纪。虽然后来的以色列人强烈谴责这种宗教，但在早期的传说中，异教圣地伯特利与雅各和他的上帝联系在一起。

When he woke up, Jacob realized that he had unwittingly spent the night in a holy place where men could have converse with their gods: “Truly Yahweh is in this place, and I never knew it!” J makes him say. He was filled with the wonder that often inspired pagans when they encountered the sacred power of the divine: “How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God (beth El); this is the gate of heaven.”¹³ He had instinctively expressed himself in the religious language of his time and culture: Babylon itself, the abode of the gods, was called “Gate of the gods” (Bab-ili). Jacob decided to consecrate this holy ground in the traditional pagan manner of the country. He took the stone he had used as a pillow, upended it and sanctified it with a libation of oil. Henceforth the place would no longer be called Luz but Beth-El, the House of El. Standing stones were a common feature of Canaanite fertility cults, which, we shall see, flourished at Beth-El until the eighth century BCE. Although later Israelites vigorously condemned this type of religion, the pagan sanctuary of Beth-El was associated in early legend with Jacob and his God.

在离开伯特利之前，雅各决定将他在那里遇到的神奉为自己的“神灵”（elohim）：这是一个技术术语，代表着神对人类和人类的一切意义。雅各认为，如果埃尔（或如雅各所称的耶和华）真的能在哈兰保护他，那么这位神就特别有效。他与埃尔达成了一项交易：作为埃尔特殊保护的回报，雅各将埃尔奉为自己的“神灵”（elohim），即唯一重要的神。以色列人对神的信仰非常务实。亚伯拉罕和雅各都信奉埃尔，因为他为他们服务：他们并没有坐下来证明他的存在；埃尔并非一个抽象的哲学概念。在古代世界，玛那（mana）是不言而喻的，神若能有效地传递玛那，便证明了自身的价值。这种务实主义将始终贯穿于神的历史之中。人们会继续接受某种特定的神性观念，因为它对他们有效，而不是因为它在科学或哲学上站得住脚。

Before he left Beth-El, Jacob had decided to make the god he had encountered there his elohim: this was a technical term, signifying everything that the gods could mean for men and women. Jacob had decided that if El (or Yahweh, as J calls him) could really look after him in Haran, he was particularly effective. He struck a bargain: in return for El’s special protection, Jacob would make him his elohim, the only god who counted. Israelite belief in God was deeply pragmatic. Abraham and Jacob both put their faith in El because he worked for them: they did not sit down and prove that he existed; El was not a philosophical abstraction. In the ancient world, mana was a self-evident fact of life, and a god proved his worth if he could transmit this effectively. This pragmatism would always be a factor in the history of God. People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.

多年后，雅各带着妻儿从哈兰返回迦南地。当他再次踏上迦南地时，又经历了一次奇异的顿悟。在西岸的雅博渡口，他遇到一个陌生人，两人摔跤一整夜。黎明时分，如同大多数神灵一般，他的对手说他必须离开，但雅各却紧紧抓住他不放：他不肯放手，直到对方说出自己的名字。在古代，知道一个人的名字就能赋予你某种控制他的力量，而这个陌生人似乎不愿透露这个信息。随着这场奇异遭遇的深入，雅各逐渐意识到，他的对手正是神以勒本人。

Years later Jacob returned from Haran with his wives and family. As he reentered the land of Canaan, he experienced another strange epiphany. At the ford of Jabbok on the West Bank, he met a stranger who wrestled with him all night. At daybreak, like most spiritual beings, his opponent said that he had to leave, but Jacob held on to him: he would not let him go until he had revealed his name. In the ancient world, knowing somebody’s name gave you a certain power over him, and the stranger seemed reluctant to reveal this piece of information. As the strange encounter developed, Jacob became aware that his opponent had been none other than El himself:

这种顿悟的精神更接近《伊利亚特》的精神，而不是后来的犹太一神论，因为在后来的犹太一神论中，与神灵如此亲密的接触似乎是一种亵渎神明的想法。

The spirit of this epiphany is closer to the spirit of the Iliad than to later Jewish monotheism, when such intimate contact with the divine would have seemed a blasphemous notion.

然而，尽管这些早期故事展现的先祖们与神相遇的方式与同时代的异教徒大致相同，但它们确实引入了一种新的宗教体验范畴。在整部《圣经》中，亚伯拉罕都被称为“有信心的人”。今天，我们倾向于将信仰定义为……理性上认同某种信条，但正如我们所见，圣经作者并不认为对上帝的信仰是一种抽象或形而上学的信念。当他们称赞亚伯拉罕的“信心”时，他们并非赞扬他的正统信仰（即接受关于上帝的正确神学观点），而是赞扬他的信赖，这与我们说我们对某人或某种理想抱有信仰时如出一辙。在圣经中，亚伯拉罕是一位有信心的人，因为他相信上帝会信守承诺，即使这些承诺看似荒谬。亚伯拉罕的妻子撒拉不孕，他怎么可能成为一个伟大民族的始祖呢？事实上，撒拉已经绝经，她还能生育的想法本身就十分荒唐，以至于当他们听到这个承诺时，撒拉和亚伯拉罕都哈哈大笑起来。然而，当他们的儿子最终奇迹般地出生时，他们给他取名为以撒，这个名字可能意味着“笑声”。但当上帝提出一个令人震惊的要求时，玩笑变成了苦涩：亚伯拉罕必须将他唯一的儿子献祭给他。

Yet even though these early tales show the patriarchs encountering their god in much the same way as their pagan contemporaries, they do introduce a new category of religious experience. Throughout the Bible, Abraham is called a man of “faith.” Today we tend to define faith as an intellectual assent to a creed, but, as we have seen, the biblical writers did not view faith in God as an abstract or metaphysical belief. When they praise the “faith” of Abraham, they are not commending his orthodoxy (the acceptance of a correct theological opinion about God) but his trust, in rather the same way as when we say that we have faith in a person or an ideal. In the Bible, Abraham is a man of faith because he trusts that God would make good his promises, even though they seem absurd. How could Abraham be the father of a great nation when his wife, Sarah, is barren? Indeed, the very idea that she could have a child is so ridiculous—Sarah has passed menopause—that when they hear this promise both Sarah and Abraham burst out laughing. When, against all the odds, their son is finally born, they call him Isaac, a name that may mean “laughter.” The joke turns sour, however, when God makes an appalling demand: Abraham must sacrifice his only son to him.

在异教世界，活人献祭十分普遍。这种做法虽然残忍，却有其逻辑和道理。人们通常认为，第一个孩子是神明的后代，神明以“领主之权”（droit de seigneur）使母亲受孕。在孕育孩子的过程中，神明的能量被耗尽，为了补充能量并确保所有可用“玛那”（ mana）的循环，第一个孩子会被献祭给其神明父母。然而，以撒的情况却截然不同。以撒是神的恩赐，而非他的亲生儿子。因此，献祭以撒并无必要，也无需补充神明的能量。事实上，献祭会使亚伯拉罕的一生都变得毫无意义，因为他的一生都建立在成为伟大民族之父的应许之上。这位神明与古代世界大多数其他神祇的形象已开始有所不同。他不受人类困境的束缚；他不需要从男女身上汲取能量。他凌驾于人类之上，可以随心所欲地提出任何要求。亚伯拉罕决定信靠他的神。他和以撒启程，开始了为期三天的摩利亚山之旅，那里后来成为了耶路撒冷圣殿的所在地。以撒对神的旨意一无所知，甚至还要自己背负献祭的柴火。直到最后一刻，当亚伯拉罕真正拿起刀的时候，神才回心转意，告诉他这只是一个考验。亚伯拉罕已经证明自己有资格成为一个强大民族的始祖，这个民族的人口将如同天上的繁星或海边的沙粒一样多。

Human sacrifice was common in the pagan world. It was cruel but had a logic and rationale. The first child was often believed to be the offspring of a god, who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur. In begetting the child, the god’s energy had been depleted, so to replenish this and to ensure the circulation of all the available mana, the firstborn was returned to its divine parent. The case of Isaac was quite different, however. Isaac had been a gift of God but not his natural son. There was no reason for the sacrifice, no need to replenish the divine energy. Indeed, the sacrifice would make nonsense of Abraham’s entire life, which had been based on the promise that he would be the father of a great nation. This god was already beginning to be conceived differently from most other deities in the ancient world. He did not share the human predicament; he did not require an input of energy from men and women. He was in a different league and could make whatever demands he chose. Abraham decided to trust his god. He and Isaac set off on a three-day journey to the Mount of Moriah, which would later be the site of the Temple in Jerusalem. Isaac, who knew nothing of the divine command, even had to carry the wood for his own holocaust. It was not until the very last moment, when Abraham actually had the knife in his hand, that God relented and told him that it had only been a test. Abraham had proved himself worthy of becoming the father of a mighty nation, which would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore.

然而，在现代人听来，这却是一个可怕的故事：它将上帝描绘成一个专横跋扈、反复无常的虐待狂，因此，许多从小听过这个故事的人如今拒绝接受这样的神明也就不足为奇了。以色列人出埃及的故事，即上帝带领摩西和以色列人获得自由的故事，同样令现代人感到不适。这个故事广为人知。法老不愿放以色列人走，为了迫使他让步，上帝降下十场可怕的灾难。尼罗河水变成血；蝗虫和青蛙肆虐大地；整个国家陷入一片漆黑。最后，上帝降下了最可怕的灾难：他差遣死亡天使杀死所有埃及人的长子，却饶恕了希伯来奴隶的儿子。不出所料，法老决定放以色列人走，但后来又改变主意，率军追赶他们。他在芦苇海追上了他们，但上帝分开红海，让以色列人干着鞋过海，拯救了他们。当埃及人紧随其后时，上帝关闭了海水，淹没了法老和他的军队。

Yet to modern ears, this is a horrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this tale as children reject such a deity. The myth of the Exodus from Egypt, when God led Moses and the children of Israel to freedom, is equally offensive to modern sensibilities. The story is well known. Pharaoh was reluctant to let the people of Israel go, so to force his hand, God sent ten fearful plagues upon the people of Egypt. The Nile was turned to blood; the land ravaged with locusts and frogs; the whole country plunged into impenetrable darkness. Finally God unleashed the most terrible plague of all: he sent the Angel of Death to kill the firstborn sons of all the Egyptians, while sparing the sons of the Hebrew slaves. Not surprisingly, Pharaoh decided to let the Israelites leave but later changed his mind and pursued them with his army. He caught up with them at the Sea of Reeds, but God saved the Israelites by opening the sea and letting them cross dry-shod. When the Egyptians followed in their wake, he closed the waters and drowned the Pharaoh and his army.

这是一个残暴、偏袒且嗜杀的神：一位战神，被称为万军之神耶和华萨巴奥特。他极度偏袒一方，除了自己所偏爱的人之外，对任何人都没有丝毫怜悯，他仅仅是一个部落神祇。如果耶和华一直保持着如此残暴的形象，那么他越早消失，对所有人来说就越好。圣经中流传至今的出埃及记的最终版本，显然并非是对事件的字面描述。然而，对于习惯于神明劈开红海的古代近东人民来说，它却蕴含着明确的信息。与马尔杜克和巴力不同，据说耶和华在世俗的历史世界中劈开了真实的大海。这其中几乎没有追求现实主义。当以色列人讲述出埃及记的故事时，他们不像我们今天这样注重历史的准确性。相反，他们想要凸显事件本身的意义，无论它究竟是什么。一些现代学者认为，《出埃及记》的故事是对迦南农民成功反抗埃及及其盟友统治的一次神话式演绎。 ¹⁵这在当时是极其罕见的事件，必将给所有参与者留下深刻的印象。这将是一次非凡的经历，展现了被压迫者反抗强权者的勇气和力量。

This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies. He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his own favorites and is simply a tribal deity. If Yahweh had remained such a savage god, the sooner he vanished, the better it would have been for everybody. The final myth of the Exodus, as it has come down to us in the Bible, is clearly not meant to be a literal version of events. It would, however, have had a clear message for the people of the ancient Middle East, who were used to gods splitting the seas in half. Yet unlike Marduk and Baal, Yahweh was said to have divided a physical sea in the profane world of historical time. There is little attempt at realism. When the Israelites recounted the story of the Exodus, they were not as interested in historical accuracy as we would be today. Instead, they wanted to bring out the significance of the original event, whatever that may have been. Some modern scholars suggest that the Exodus story is a mythical rendering of a successful peasants’ revolt against the suzerainty of Egypt and its allies in Canaan.¹⁵ This would have been an extremely rare occurrence at the time and would have made an indelible impression on everybody involved. It would have been an extraordinary experience of the empowerment of the oppressed against the powerful and the mighty.

我们将看到，尽管出埃及记的神话在三大一神教中都占据重要地位，但耶和华并没有始终是出埃及记中那个残酷暴力的神。令人惊讶的是，以色列人将他彻底改造，使他成为超越和慈悲的象征。然而，出埃及记的血腥故事仍然激发了人们对神性的危险认知和复仇神学。我们将公元前七世纪，《申命记》的作者（D）运用古老的神话来阐释令人恐惧的拣选神学，这种神学在不同的时期都对三大宗教的历史产生了深远的影响。如同任何人类观念一样，上帝的概念也可能被利用和滥用。从《申命记》的作者时代起，直到如今犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教的原教旨主义盛行之时，关于“选民”和“神圣拣选”的神话常常催生出一种狭隘的、部落式的神学。然而，《申命记》的作者也保留了对出埃及记神话的一种解读，这种解读在一神论的历史上同样具有影响力，甚至更为积极。这种解读描绘了一位站在弱者和受压迫者一边的上帝。申命记26章中，我们或许可以看到在《约拿书》和《以赛亚书》记载出埃及记故事之前，对这段故事的一种早期解读。以色列人被命令将初熟的果实献给耶和华的祭司，并作如下宣告：

We shall see that Yahweh did not remain the cruel and violent god of the Exodus, even though the myth has been important in all three of the monotheistic religions. Surprising as it may seem, the Israelites would transform him beyond recognition into a symbol of transcendence and compassion. Yet the bloody story of the Exodus would continue to inspire dangerous conceptions of the divine and a vengeful theology. We shall see that during the seventh century BCE, the Deuteronomist author (D) would use the old myth to illustrate the fearful theology of election, which has, at different times, played a fateful role in the history of all three faiths. Like any human idea, the notion of God can be exploited and abused. The myth of a Chosen People and a divine election has often inspired a narrow, tribal theology from the time of the Deuteronomist right up to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism that is unhappily rife in our own day. Yet the Deuteronomist has also preserved an interpretation of the Exodus myth that has been equally and more positively effective in the history of monotheism, which speaks of a God who is on the side of the impotent and the oppressed. In Deuteronomy 26, we have what may be an early interpretation of the Exodus story before it was written down in the narratives of J and E. The Israelites are commanded to present the first fruits of the harvest to the priests of Yahweh and make this affirmation:

历史上第一次成功的农民起义可能是由一位革命之神所启示的。在三大宗教中，他都激发了人们对社会正义的理想，尽管必须指出的是，犹太教徒、基督教徒和穆斯林往往未能践行这一理想，反而将他变成了维护现状的神。

The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants’ uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo.

以色列人称耶和华为“我们列祖的神”，然而他似乎与迦南人的至高神埃尔（El，列祖所敬拜的神）截然不同。他或许在成为以色列的神之前，曾是其他民族的神。在早期向摩西显现时，耶和华反复强调，他确实是亚伯拉罕的神，尽管他最初被称为全能的神（El Shaddai）。这种强调或许保留了早期辩论的遥远回响。关于摩西的神的身份，有人认为耶和华最初是一位战神、火山之神，是米甸（今约旦境内）人所敬拜的神。^我们永远无法得知以色列人究竟在哪里发现了耶和华，如果他真的是一位全新的神。这在今天对我们而言是一个非常重要的问题，但对圣经作者来说却并非如此关键。在古代异教时期，神祇常常被融合，或者一个地方的神被认为是另一个民族的神。我们唯一可以确定的是，无论他的起源如何，出埃及记的事件使耶和华成为以色列的最终神，而摩西也成功地让以色列人相信，他与亚伯拉罕、以撒和雅各所敬爱的神伊勒是同一位。

The Israelites called Yahweh “the God of our fathers,” yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs. He may have been the god of other people before he became the God of Israel. In all his early appearances to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El Shaddai. This insistence may preserve the distant echoes of a very early debate about the identity of the God of Moses. It has been suggested that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan.¹⁷ We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

所谓的“米甸人理论”——即耶和华最初是米甸人的神——如今通常不被认可，但摩西第一次见到耶和华异象正是在米甸。人们或许还记得，摩西曾因杀死一个虐待以色列奴隶的埃及人而被驱逐出埃及。他逃到米甸避难，在那里娶妻。当他在岳父家放羊时，看到了一个奇异的景象：一丛燃烧却不被烧毁的荆棘。当他走近查看时，耶和华呼唤他的名字，摩西喊道：“我在这里！”（hineni!），这正是每一位以色列先知在面对要求他们全然敬拜和忠诚的神时都会作出的回应。

The so-called “Midianite Theory”—that Yahweh was originally a god of the people of Midian—is usually discredited today, but it was in Midian that Moses had his first vision of Yahweh. It will be recalled that Moses had been forced to flee Egypt for killing an Egyptian who was ill-treating an Israelite slave. He had taken refuge in Midian, married there, and it was while he was tending his father-in-law’s sheep that he had seen a strange sight: a bush that burned without being consumed. When he went closer to investigate, Yahweh had called to him by name and Moses had cried: “Here I am!” (hineni!), the response of every prophet of Israel when he encountered the God who demanded total attention and loyalty:

尽管圣经首先宣称耶和华确实是亚伯拉罕的神，但这显然与那位曾与亚伯拉罕同席共餐、如同朋友般的神截然不同。他令人敬畏，并刻意保持距离。当摩西询问他的姓名和身份时，耶和华用一个双关语回答，正如我们将看到的，这个双关语在之后的几个世纪里一直困扰着一神论者。他没有直接透露自己的名字，而是回答说：“我是自有永有的（Ehyeh asher ehyeh）。” ¹⁹他是什么意思呢？他当然不是像后来的哲学家所断言的那样，认为自己是自存的存在。当时的希伯来语还没有这种形而上学的维度，直到近两千年后才发展出这种维度。上帝似乎想表达的是一种更为直接的含义。“Ehyeh asher ehyeh”是希伯来语中用来表达刻意模糊的习语。当圣经使用……像“他们去了他们去的地方”这样的短语，其含义是：“我一点也不知道他们去了哪里。”所以当摩西问上帝是谁时，上帝的回答实际上是：“你不必在意我是谁！”或者“管好你自己的事！”上帝的本质不容讨论，更不容像异教徒那样，在念诵他们神明的名字时试图操纵他。耶和华是无条件的：我将成为我所将成为的。他将完全按照他的意愿行事，并且不会做出任何保证。他只是承诺会参与他子民的历史。出埃及记的神话最终被证明是决定性的：它能够在看似不可能的情况下，为未来带来希望。

Despite the first of the assertions that Yahweh is indeed the God of Abraham, this is clearly a very different kind of deity from the one who had sat and shared a meal with Abraham as his friend. He inspires terror and insists upon distance. When Moses asks his name and credentials, Yahweh replies with a pun which, as we shall see, would exercise monotheists for centuries. Instead of revealing his name directly, he answers: “I Am Who I Am (Ehyeh asher ehyeh).”¹⁹ What did he mean? He certainly did not mean, as later philosophers would assert, that he was self-subsistent Being. Hebrew did not have such a metaphysical dimension at this stage, and it would be nearly 2000 years before it acquired one. God seems to have meant something rather more direct. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is a Hebrew idiom to express a deliberate vagueness. When the Bible uses a phrase like “they went where they went,” it means: “I haven’t the faintest idea where they went.” So when Moses asks who he is, God replies in effect: “Never you mind who I am!” or “Mind your own business!” There was to be no discussion of God’s nature and certainly no attempt to manipulate him as pagans sometimes did when they recited the names of their gods. Yahweh is the Unconditioned One: I shall be that which I shall be. He will be exactly as he chooses and will make no guarantees. He simply promised that he would participate in the history of his people. The myth of the Exodus would prove decisive: it was able to engender hope for the future, even in impossible circumstances.

这种新的力量感是有代价的。人们觉得古老的天神离人类的事务太过遥远；年轻的神祇，如巴力、马尔杜克和母神，虽然与人类亲近，但耶和华再次拉开了人与神之间的鸿沟。西奈山的故事生动地展现了这一点。当人们到达山上时，他们被告知要洁净衣服，并与山保持距离。摩西不得不警告以色列人：“你们要小心，不可上山，也不可摸山脚。凡摸山的，必被处死。”人们远离山，耶和华驾着火云降临。

There was a price to be paid for this new sense of empowerment. The old Sky Gods had been experienced as too remote from human concerns; the younger deities like Baal, Marduk and the Mother Goddesses had come close to mankind, but Yahweh had opened the gulf between man and the divine world once again. This is graphically clear in the story of Mount Sinai. When they arrived at the mountain, the people were told to purify their garments and keep their distance. Moses had to warn the Israelites: “Take care not to go up the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death.” The people stood back from the mountain and Yahweh descended in fire and cloud:

摩西独自登上山顶，领受了律法石板。与异教徒的观念不同，律法不再体现在事物本身的秩序、和谐与公正之中，而是自上而下地颁布。历史之神或许能激励人们更加关注世俗世界——祂的舞台，但同时也可能导致人们与世俗世界产生深刻的疏离感。

Moses alone went up to the summit and received the tablets of the Law. Instead of experiencing the principles of order, harmony and justice in the very nature of things, as in the pagan vision, the Law is now handed down from on high. The God of history can inspire a greater attention to the mundane world, which is the theater of his operations, but there is also the potential for a profound alienation from it.

在公元前五世纪编纂的《出埃及记》最终文本中，上帝被描述为在西奈山上与摩西立约（此事据推测发生在公元前1200年左右）。学术界对此一直存在争议：一些批评者认为该约并未生效。在公元前七世纪之前，约在以色列仍然十分重要。但无论其具体年代如何，约的概念都表明以色列人当时并非一神论者，因为约只有在多神教的背景下才有意义。以色列人并不认为西奈山的上帝耶和华是唯一的神，而是在约中承诺忽略所有其他神祇，只敬拜他。在整部摩西五经中，几乎找不到任何关于一神论的表述。即使是西奈山上颁布的十诫也默认了其他神祇的存在：“你们不可在我面前有别的神。” ²¹敬拜一神几乎是前所未有的举动：埃及法老阿肯那顿曾试图敬拜太阳神，忽略埃及的其他传统神祇，但他的政策立即被其继任者推翻。忽略潜在的玛那来源，坦白说是愚蠢的，而以色列人后来的历史表明，他们非常不愿意放弃对其他神祇的崇拜。耶和华在战争中展现了他的卓越才能，但他并非丰饶之神。当他们定居迦南时，以色列人本能地转向了巴力——迦南的领主，自古以来，巴力就使庄稼丰收。先知们劝诫以色列人要忠于圣约，但大多数人仍然以传统的方式继续崇拜巴力、亚舍拉和阿纳特。事实上，《圣经》告诉我们，当摩西在西奈山上时，其余的人又重新信奉了迦南古老的异教。他们铸造了一头金牛，作为埃尔的传统象征，并在它面前举行古老的仪式。将这一事件与西奈山上那令人敬畏的启示形成鲜明对比，或许是摩西五经的最终编纂者试图暗示以色列分裂的痛苦。像摩西这样的先知宣扬耶和华崇高的宗教，但大多数人却渴望回归古老的仪式，以及其中关于神、自然和人类和谐统一的整体观。

In the final text of Exodus, edited in the fifth century BCE, God is said to have made a covenant with Moses on Mount Sinai (an event which is supposed to have happened around 1200). There has been a scholarly debate about this: some critics believe that the covenant did not become important in Israel until the seventh century BCE. But whatever its date, the idea of the covenant tells us that the Israelites were not yet monotheists, since it only made sense in a polytheistic setting. The Israelites did not believe that Yahweh, the God of Sinai, was the only God but promised, in their covenant, that they would ignore all the other deities and worship him alone. It is very difficult to find a single monotheistic statement in the whole of the Pentateuch. Even the Ten Commandments delivered on Mount Sinai take the existence of other gods for granted: “There shall be no strange gods for you before my face.”²¹ The worship of a single deity was an almost unprecedented step: the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton had attempted to worship the Sun God and to ignore the other traditional deities of Egypt, but his policies were immediately reversed by his successor. To ignore a potential source of mana seemed frankly foolhardy, and the subsequent history of the Israelites shows that they were very reluctant to neglect the cult of the other gods. Yahweh had proved his expertise in war, but he was not a fertility god. When they settled in Canaan, the Israelites turned instinctively to the cult of Baal, the Landlord of Canaan, who had made the crops grow from time immemorial. The prophets would urge the Israelites to remain true to the covenant, but the majority would continue to worship Baal, Asherah and Anat in the traditional way. Indeed, the Bible tells us that while Moses was up on Mount Sinai, the rest of the people turned back to the older pagan religion of Canaan. They made a golden bull, the traditional effigy of El, and performed the ancient rites before it. The placing of this incident in stark juxtaposition to the awesome revelation on Mount Sinai may be an attempt by the final editors of the Pentateuch to indicate the bitterness of the division in Israel. Prophets like Moses preached the lofty religion of Yahweh, but most of the people wanted the older rituals, with their holistic vision of unity among the gods, nature and mankind.

然而，以色列人在出埃及后曾承诺只敬拜耶和华，尊他为独一的神，先知们在后世也多次提醒他们这一约定。他们承诺只敬拜耶和华，尊他为他们的神（elohim），作为回报，耶和华承诺他们将成为他的子民，蒙受他独有的、有效的保护。耶和华警告他们，如果他们违背此约，他将毫不留情地毁灭他们。然而，以色列人最终还是立下了盟约。在《约书亚记》中，我们或许可以找到以色列与其神之间庆祝此约的早期文本。此约是一种正式的条约，在中东政治中常被用来维系双方的关系。它遵循一套固定的形式。协议的文本如下：首先介绍实力更强的一方——国王，然后追溯双方关系的历史直至今日。最后，阐明盟约的条款、条件以及若违背盟约将面临的惩罚。整个盟约的核心在于对绝对忠诚的要求。在14世纪赫梯国王穆尔西里斯二世与其附庸杜皮·塔什德签订的盟约中，国王提出了这样的要求：“不可投靠他人。你们的祖先在埃及进贡，你们不可效仿……你们要与我的朋友为友，与我的敌人为敌。”《圣经》记载，以色列人抵达迦南与当地亲属会合后，亚伯拉罕的所有后裔都与耶和华立约。仪式由摩西的继承人约书亚主持，他代表耶和华。盟约遵循传统模式：首先介绍耶和华；回顾他与亚伯拉罕、以撒和雅各的交往；然后，约书亚讲述了出埃及记的经过。最后，他阐明了协议的条款，并要求聚集在一起的以色列百姓正式同意。

Yet the Israelites had promised to make Yahweh their only god after the Exodus, and the prophets would remind them of this agreement in later years. They had promised to worship Yahweh alone as their elohim, and, in return, he had promised that they would be his special people and enjoy his uniquely efficacious protection. Yahweh had warned them that if they broke this agreement, he would destroy them mercilessly. Yet the Israelites had entered into the covenant agreement, nonetheless. In the book of Joshua we find what may be an early text of the celebration of this covenant between Israel and its God. The covenant was a formal treaty that was frequently used in Middle Eastern politics to bind two parties together. It followed a set form. The text of the agreement would begin by introducing the king who was the more powerful partner and would then trace the history of the relations between the two parties to the present time. Finally, it stated the terms, conditions and penalties that would accrue if the covenant were neglected. Essential to the whole covenant idea was the demand for absolute loyalty. In the fourteenth-century covenant between the Hittite King Mursilis II and his vassal Duppi Tashed, the king made this demand: “Do not turn to anyone else. Your fathers presented tribute in Egypt; you shall not do that.… With my friend you shall be friend and with my enemy you shall be enemy.” The Bible tells us that when the Israelites had arrived in Canaan and joined up with their kinsfolk there, all the descendants of Abraham made a covenant with Yahweh. The ceremony was conducted by Moses’ successor Joshua, who represented Yahweh. The agreement follows the traditional pattern. Yahweh was introduced; his dealings with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob recalled; then the events of the Exodus were related. Finally Joshua stipulated the terms of the agreement and demanded the formal assent of the assembled people of Israel:

百姓要在耶和华和迦南的传统神祇之间做出选择。他们毫不犹豫。没有其他神能与耶和华相比；没有其他神明曾如此有效地帮助过他的信徒。他大有能力地介入他们的事务，无可辩驳地证明耶和华完全胜任他们的神：他们要单单敬拜他，弃绝其他神明。约书亚警告他们，耶和华极其忌邪。如果他们违背盟约的条款，他必毁灭他们。百姓立场坚定：他们选择耶和华作为他们唯一的神。“你们要从你们中间除掉外邦^的神明！”约书亚喊道，“要将你们的心献给耶和华以色列的神！”

The people had a choice between Yahweh and the traditional gods of Canaan. They did not hesitate. There was no other god like Yahweh; no other deity had ever been so effective on behalf of his worshippers. His powerful intervention in their affairs had demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that Yahweh was up to the job of being their elohim: they would worship him alone and cast away the other gods. Joshua warned them that Yahweh was exceedingly jealous. If they neglected the terms of the covenant, he would destroy them. The people stood firm: they chose Yahweh alone as their elohim. “Then cast away the alien gods from among you!” Josuah cried, “and give your hearts to Yahweh, the God of Israel!”²³

圣经表明，人们并没有忠于圣约。他们在战争时期，需要耶和华精锐的军事保护时，才会想起圣约；但在安逸时期，他们却以旧的方式敬拜巴力、阿纳特和亚舍拉。尽管耶和华的崇拜本质上是……虽然其历史倾向有所不同，但它常常以古老的异教形式来表达自身。所罗门王在耶路撒冷——他父亲大卫从耶布斯人手中夺取的城市——为耶和华建造圣殿时，其样式与迦南诸神的庙宇相似。圣殿由三个方形区域组成，尽头是一个被称为至​​圣所的小型立方体房间，里面存放着约柜——以色列人在旷野漂流期间随身携带的便携式祭坛。圣殿内有一个巨大的青铜盆，象征着迦南神话中的原始海洋雅姆，还有两根四十英尺高的独立柱子，代表着亚舍拉的生育崇拜。以色列人继续在他们从迦南人那里继承的古老神龛中敬拜耶和华，这些神龛位于伯特利、示罗、希伯仑、伯利恒和但，那里经常举行异教仪式。然而，圣殿很快就变得特殊起来，尽管正如我们将看到的，那里也存在一些非常规的活动。以色列人开始将圣殿视为耶和华天庭的复制品。他们在秋季举行自己的新年庆典，从赎罪日的献祭替罪羊仪式开始，五天后是住棚节的丰收节，庆祝农业年的开始。有人认为，一些诗篇歌颂了耶和华在住棚节期间于圣殿登基，这与马尔杜克的登基一样，重现了他最初征服混沌的壮举。24 所罗门王本人是一位伟大的融合主义^者：他娶了许多异教妻子，她们敬拜各自的神明，并且与他的异教邻居保持着友好的关系。

The Bible shows that the people were not true to the covenant. They remembered it in times of war, when they needed Yahweh’s skilled military protection, but when times were easy they worshipped Baal, Anat and Asherah in the old way. Although Yahweh’s cult was fundamentally different in its historical bias, it often expressed itself in terms of the old paganism. When King Solomon built a Temple for Yahweh in Jerusalem, the city that his father, David, had captured from the Jebusites, it was similar to the temples of the Canaanite gods. It consisted of three square areas, which culminated in the small, cube-shaped room known as the Holy of Holies which contained the Ark of the Covenant, the portable altar which the Israelites had with them during their years in the wilderness. Inside the Temple was a huge bronze basin, representing Yam, the primeval sea of Canaanite myth, and two forty-foot freestanding pillars, indicating the fertility cult of Asherah. The Israelites continued to worship Yahweh in the ancient shrines which they had inherited from the Canaanites at Beth-El, Shiloh, Hebron, Bethlehem and Dan, where there were frequently pagan ceremonies. The Temple soon became special, however, even though, as we shall see, there were some remarkably unorthodox activities there too. The Israelites began to see the Temple as the replica of Yahweh’s heavenly court. They had their own New Year Festival in the autumn, beginning with the scapegoat ceremony on the Day of Atonement, followed five days later by the harvest festival of the Feast of Tabernacles, which celebrated the beginning of the agricultural year. It has been suggested that some of the psalms celebrated the enthronement of Yahweh in his Temple on the Feast of Tabernacles, which, like the enthronement of Marduk, re-enacted his primal subjugation of chaos.²⁴ King Solomon himself was a great syncretist: he had many pagan wives, who worshipped their own gods, and had friendly dealings with his pagan neighbors.

耶和华崇拜始终面临着被大众异教淹没的危险。这种危险在九世纪后半叶尤为突出。公元869年，亚哈王继承了以色列北部王国的王位。他的妻子耶洗别，是推罗和西顿王（今黎巴嫩境内）的女儿，是一位狂热的异教徒，一心想让全国皈依巴力和亚舍拉的宗教。她引进了巴力祭司，这些祭司很快在北方人中获得了追随者。北方人曾被大卫王征服，对耶和华的信仰并不坚定。亚哈王仍然忠于耶和华，但并没有试图阻止耶洗别的传教活动。然而，在他统治末期，一场严重的旱灾席卷了这片土地。一位名叫以利·雅（意为“耶和华是我的神！”）的先知开始在全国各地游荡，他身披毛皮斗篷，腰间系着皮质腰布，痛斥人们对耶和华的背叛。他召集亚哈王和百姓到迦密山上，与耶和华和巴力进行一场较量。在那里，在450位先知的见证下……他向众人宣讲巴力神的事：他们还要在两个神之间犹豫多久？于是他命人取来两头公牛，一头献给自己，一头献给巴力的先知，分别放在两个祭坛上。他们要呼求自己的神，看哪一位会降下天火焚烧燔祭。“同意！”众人齐声喊道。巴力的先知们整整一个上午都在呼喊巴力的名字，绕着祭坛跳着蹒跚的舞蹈，一边喊叫，一边用刀剑长矛刺伤自己。但是“没有声音，没有回应”。以利亚讥讽道：“大声呼喊吧！”他喊道，“因为他是神：他可能心事重重，或者忙着别的事，或者他出远门了；也许他睡着了，一会儿就会醒来。”然而什么也没发生：“没有声音，没有回应，没有人理会他们。”

There was always a danger that the cult of Yahweh would eventually be submerged by the popular paganism. This became particularly acute during the latter half of the ninth century. In 869 King Ahab had succeeded to the throne of the northern Kingdom of Israel. His wife, Jezebel, daughter of the King of Tyre and Sidon in what is now Lebanon, was an ardent pagan, intent upon converting the country to the religion of Baal and Asherah. She imported priests of Baal, who quickly acquired a following among the northerners, who had been conquered by King David and were lukewarm Yahwists. Ahab remained true to Yahweh but did not try to curb Jezebel’s proselytism. When a severe drought struck the land toward the end of his reign, however, a prophet named Eli-Jah (“Yahweh is my god!”) began to wander through the land, clad in a hairy mantle and a leather loincloth, fulminating against the disloyalty to Yahweh. He summoned King Ahab and the people to a contest on Mount Carmel between Yahweh and Baal. There, in the presence of 450 prophets of Baal, he harangued the people: how long would they dither between the two deities? Then he called for two bulls, one for himself and one for the prophets of Baal, to be placed on two altars. They would call upon their gods and see which one sent down fire from heaven to consume the holocaust. “Agreed!” cried the people. The prophets of Baal shouted his name for the whole morning, performing their hobbling dance around their altar, yelling and gashing themselves with swords and spears. But “there was no voice, no answer.” Elijah jeered: “Call louder!” he cried, “for he is a god: he is preoccupied or he is busy, or he has gone on a journey; perhaps he is asleep and he will wake up.” Nothing happened: “there was no voice, no answer, no attention given them.”

接下来轮到以利亚了。众人围在耶和华的祭坛周围，以利亚则在祭坛周围挖了一条沟，并灌满水，使祭坛更难点燃。然后以利亚呼求耶和华。果然，立刻有火从天而降，烧毁了祭坛和祭牲，连沟里的水也都被烧干了。众人俯伏在地，高呼：“耶和华是神！耶和华是神！”以利亚并非一位仁慈的胜利者。“抓住巴力的先知！”他命令道。一个也不放过：他把他们带到附近的山谷，全部宰杀。25^异教通常不会试图将自己的信仰强加于他人——耶洗别是一个有趣的例外——因为在众神之中，总能容纳另一个神。这些早期神话事件表明，耶和华信仰从一开始就要求对其他信仰进行暴力镇压和否定，我们将在下一章更详细地探讨这一现象。屠杀之后，以利亚登上迦密山顶，跪在地上祷告，不时派仆人眺望远方。最终，仆人带来消息，说海面上升起一小片云——大约手掌大小——以利亚吩咐他去警告亚哈王，让他赶紧回家，免得被雨水阻挡。话音刚落，天空乌云密布，暴雨倾盆而下。以利亚欣喜若狂，卷起斗篷，奔跑在亚哈的战车旁。耶和华降下雨水，取代了风暴之神巴力的职能，证明他在赐予丰饶方面与在战争方面一样强大。

Then it was Elijah’s turn. The people crowded around the altar of Yahweh while he dug a trench around it which he filled with water, to make it even more difficult to ignite. Then Elijah called upon Yahweh. Immediately, of course, fire fell from heaven and consumed the altar and the bull, licking up all the water in the trench. The people fell upon their faces: “Yahweh is God,” they cried, “Yahweh is God.” Elijah was not a generous victor. “Seize the prophets of Baal!” he ordered. Not one was to be spared: he took them to a nearby valley and slaughtered the lot.²⁵ Paganism did not usually seek to impose itself on other people—Jezebel is an interesting exception—since there was always room for another god in the pantheon alongside the others. These early mythical events show that from the first Yahwism demanded a violent repression and denial of other faiths, a phenomenon we shall examine in more detail in the next chapter. After the massacre, Elijah climbed up to the top of Mount Carmel and sat in prayer with his head between his knees, sending his servant from time to time to scan the horizon. Eventually he brought news of a small cloud—about the size of a man’s hand—rising up from the sea, and Elijah told him to go and warn King Ahab to hurry home before the rain stopped him. Almost as he spoke, the sky darkened with storm clouds and the rain fell in torrents. In an ecstasy, Elijah tucked up his cloak and ran alongside Ahab’s chariot. By sending rain, Yahweh had usurped the function of Baal, the Storm God, proving that he was just as effective in fertility as in war.

因害怕先知们因他屠杀先知而遭到报复，以利亚逃往西奈半岛，躲在上帝曾向摩西显现的山上。在那里，他经历了一次神显，展现了新的耶和华灵性。他被告知要站在岩石缝隙中，以保护自己免受神圣力量的冲击：

Fearing a reaction against his massacre of the prophets, Elijah fled to the Sinai peninsula and took refuge on the mountain where God had revealed himself to Moses. There he experienced a theophany which manifested the new Yahwist spirituality. He was told to stand in the crevice of a rock to shield himself from the divine impact:

与异教神祇不同，耶和华并非存在于任何自然力量之中，而是存在于一个超然的领域。在寂静无声的悖论中，人们能感受到他如同微风般几乎难以察觉的细微声响。

Unlike the pagan deities, Yahweh was not in any of the forces of nature but in a realm apart. He is experienced in the scarcely perceptible timbre of a tiny breeze in the paradox of a voiced silence.

以利亚的故事包含了犹太教经典中关于过去的最后一个神话传说。整个奥伊库梅内时代都弥漫着变革的气息。公元前800年至公元前200年被称为轴心时代。在文明世界的主要地区，人们创造了新的意识形态，这些意识形态至今仍然至关重要，并具有塑造性意义。新的宗教体系反映了经济和社会状况的变化。出于我们尚未完全理解的原因，所有主要文明都沿着相似的路线发展，即使在没有商业联系的情况下（例如中国和欧洲地区之间）。新的繁荣催生了商人阶层的崛起。权力从国王和祭司、神庙和宫殿转移到了市场。新的财富带来了思想和文化的繁荣，也促进了个人意识的发展。随着城市变革步伐的加快，不平等和剥削现象也日益凸显，人们开始意识到自己的行为会影响子孙后代的命运。每个地区都发展出独特的意识形态来应对这些问题和关切：中国的道教和儒家思想，印度的印度教和佛教，以及欧洲的哲学理性主义。中东地区并没有产生统一的解决方案，但在伊朗和以色列，琐罗亚斯德教和希伯来先知分别发展出了不同版本的一神论。或许听起来有些奇怪，但“上帝”的概念，如同当时其他伟大的宗教见解一样，是在市场经济中，在激进资本主义的精神下发展起来的。

The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish scriptures. Change was in the air throughout the Oikumene. The period 800–200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God,” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.

在下一章探讨耶和华改革宗教之前，我打算先简要介绍其中两项新发展。印度的宗教经验发展轨迹与之类似，但其不同的侧重点将有助于阐明以色列人上帝观念的独特特征和问题。柏拉图和亚里士多德的理性主义也十分重要，因为犹太教徒、基督教徒和穆斯林都深受其影响。他们根据自己的思想，试图将这些思想融入到自己的宗教体验中，尽管希腊神与他们自己的神截然不同。

I propose to look briefly at two of these new developments before proceeding in the next chapter to examine the reformed religion of Yahweh. The religious experience of India developed along similar lines, but its different emphasis will illuminate the peculiar characteristics and problems of the Israelite notion of God. The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle is also important because Jews, Christians and Muslims all drew upon their ideas and tried to adapt them to their own religious experience, even though the Greek God was very different from their own.

公元前十七世纪，来自今伊朗地区的雅利安人入侵印度河流域，征服了当地土著居民。他们强加了自己的宗教思想，这些思想体现在被称为《梨俱吠陀》的颂歌集中。在《梨俱吠陀》中，我们发现了众多神祇，他们所表达的许多价值观与中东的神祇相似，并将自然之力描绘成具有力量、生命和个性的本能。然而，种种迹象表明，人们开始意识到，这些不同的神祇或许仅仅是超越一切的至高神圣存在的化身。与巴比伦人一样，雅利安人也清楚地认识到，他们的神话并非对现实的客观描述，而是表达了一种连神祇自身都无法充分解释的奥秘。当他们试图想象神祇和世界是如何从原始混沌中演化而来时，他们得出结论：没有人——甚至神祇本身——能够理解存在的奥秘。

In the seventeenth century BCE, Aryans from what is now Iran had invaded the Indus valley and subdued the indigenous population. They had imposed their religious ideas, which we find expressed in the collection of odes known as the Rig-Veda. There we find a multitude of gods, expressing many of the same values as the deities of the Middle East and presenting the forces of nature as instinct with power, life and personality. Yet there were signs that people were beginning to see that the various gods might simply be manifestations of one divine Absolute that transcended them all. Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

吠陀经的宗教并不试图解释生命的起源，也不试图对哲学问题给出权威的答案。相反，它的目的是帮助人们理解存在的奇妙与恐惧。它提出的问题远多于答案，旨在使人们保持一种敬畏的惊奇之心。

The religion of the Vedas did not attempt to explain the origins of life or to give privileged answers to philosophical questions. Instead, it was designed to help people to come to terms with the wonder and terror of existence. It asked more questions than it answered, designed to hold the people in an attitude of reverent wonder.

公元前八世纪，当J和E撰写他们的编年史时，印度次大陆的社会和经济状况发生了变化，古老的吠陀宗教已不再适用。在雅利安人入侵后的几个世纪里被压制的本土居民的思想开始浮出水面，引发了新的宗教渴望。人们对业力（karma）——即人的命运由其自身行为决定——的兴趣重新燃起，这使得人们不愿将人类不负责任的行为归咎于神灵。神灵越来越被视为单一超越现实的象征。吠陀宗教过于注重祭祀仪式，但人们对古老的印度瑜伽（通过特殊的专注训练来“结合”心智力量）的兴趣重新燃起，这意味着人们开始感到不满。他们信奉的宗教过于注重外在形式。献祭和仪式并不足以满足他们的需求：他们渴望探寻这些仪式的内在意义。值得注意的是，以色列的先知们也曾有过同样的不满。在印度，神不再被视为独立于信徒之外的存在；相反，人们寻求在内心深处领悟真理。

By the eighth century BCE, when J and E were writing their chronicles, changes in the social and economic conditions of the Indian subcontinent meant that the old Vedic religion was no longer relevant. The ideas of the indigenous population that had been suppressed in the centuries following the Aryan invasions surfaced and led to a new religious hunger. The revived interest in karma, the notion that one’s destiny is determined by one’s own actions, made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsible behavior of human beings. Increasingly the gods were seen as symbols of a single transcendent Reality. Vedic religion had become preoccupied with the rituals of sacrifice, but the revived interest in the old Indian practice of Yoga (the “yoking” of the powers of the mind by special disciplines of concentration) meant that people became dissatisfied with a religion that concentrated on externals. Sacrifice and liturgy were not enough: they wanted to discover the inner meaning of these rites. We shall note that the prophets of Israel felt the same dissatisfaction. In India, the gods were no longer seen as other beings who were external to their worshippers; instead men and women sought to achieve an inward realization of truth.

在印度，诸神不再那么重要。从此以后，宗教导师的地位超越了诸神，被视为高于诸神。这有力地肯定了人性的价值以及掌控命运的渴望，堪称次大陆最伟大的宗教洞见。印度教和佛教这两种新兴宗教既没有否认诸神的存在，也没有禁止人们崇拜他们。在他们看来，这种压制和否定是有害的。相反，印度教徒和佛教徒寻求超越诸神、达到更高境界的新途径。公元前八世纪，圣贤们开始在被称为《森林书》（Aranyakas）和《奥义书》（Upanishads）的论著中探讨这些问题，这些论著统称为吠檀多（Vedanta），是吠陀经的终结。越来越多的《奥义书》出现，到公元前五世纪末，数量已达约200部。我们无法对被称为印度教的宗教进行概括，因为它摒弃体系，否认任何单一的解释能够完全涵盖一切。但《奥义书》确实发展出一种独特的神性概念，这种概念超越了诸神，却又与万物紧密相连。

The gods were no longer very important in India. Henceforth they would be superseded by the religious teacher, who would be considered higher than the gods. It was a remarkable assertion of the value of humanity and the desire to take control of destiny: it would be the great religious insight of the subcontinent. The new religions of Hinduism and Buddhism did not deny the existence of the gods, nor did they forbid the people to worship them. In their view, such repression and denial would be damaging. Instead, Hindus and Buddhists sought new ways to transcend the gods, to go beyond them. During the eighth century, sages began to address these issues in the treatises called the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, known collectively as the Vedanta: the end of the Vedas. More and more Upanisbads appeared, until by the end of the fifth century BCE there were about 200 of them. It is impossible to generalize about the religion we call Hinduism because it eschews systems and denies that one exclusive interpretation can be adequate. But the Upanishads did evolve a distinctive conception of godhood that transcends the gods but is found to be intimately present in all things.

在吠陀宗教中，人们在祭祀仪式中体验到一种神圣的力量。他们将这种神圣的力量称为梵天（Brahman）。祭司阶层（被称为婆罗门）也被认为拥有这种力量。由于祭祀仪式被视为整个宇宙的缩影，梵天逐渐演变为维系万物的力量。整个世界被视为源自梵天神秘存在的神圣活动，而梵天正是所有存在的内在意义。《奥义书》鼓励人们在万事万物中培养梵天意识。这是一个启示的过程，从字面上看就是启示：它是揭示万物存在的隐秘根源。发生的一切都成为梵天的显现：真正的洞察力在于感知不同现象背后统一性的本质。一些《奥义书》将梵天视为一种人格化的力量，而另一些则认为它是完全非人格化的。梵天不能被称作“你”；它是一个中性词，既非他，也非她。它既非被视为至高神祇的意志，也非人类所能感知。梵天不与人类对话，它无法与人相遇；它超越一切人类活动，也不回应……从个人角度来说，罪恶并不会“冒犯”它，它也不能被说成“爱”我们或“愤怒”。感谢或赞美它创造了世界是完全不恰当的。

In Vedic religion, people had experienced a holy power in the sacrificial ritual. They had called this sacred power Brahman. The priestly caste (known as Brahmanas) were also believed to possess this power. Since the ritual sacrifice was seen as the microcosm of the whole universe, Brahman gradually came to mean a power which sustains everything. The whole world was seen as the divine activity welling up from the mysterious being of Brahman, which was the inner meaning of all existence. The Upanishads encouraged people to cultivate a sense of Brahman in all things. It was a process of revelation in the literal meaning of the word: it was an unveiling of the hidden ground of all being. Everything that happens became a manifestation of Brahman: true insight lay in the perception of the unity behind the different phenomena. Some of the Upanishads saw Brahman as a personal power, but others saw it as strictly impersonal. Brahman cannot be addressed as “thou”; it is a neutral term, so is neither he nor she; nor is it experienced as the will of a sovereign deity. Brahman does not speak to mankind. It cannot meet men and women; it transcends all such human activities. Nor does it respond to us in a personal way: sin does not “offend” it, and it cannot be said to “love” us or be “angry.” Thanking or praising it for creating the world would be entirely inappropriate.

这种神圣的力量若非遍及、维系并激励着我们，将会显得格格不入。瑜伽的技巧使人们意识到内在世界的存在。正如我们将看到的，这些关于姿势、呼吸、饮食和精神集中的修行方法在其他文化中也独立发展起来，似乎都能带来一种启迪和觉悟的体验。这种体验虽有不同的解读，但对人类而言却似乎是自然而然的。《奥义书》声称，这种对自我新维度的体验，正是维系世界万物的同一神圣力量。每个人内在的永恒原则被称为“阿特曼”（Atman）：它是对古老异教整体观的一种新诠释，是对我们内在和外在的“唯一生命”的全新解读，而这“唯一生命”本质上是神圣的。《歌者奥义书》用盐的寓言解释了这一点。一个名叫斯雷塔凯图（Sretaketu）的年轻人研习吠陀经十二年，颇为自负。他的父亲乌达拉卡问了他一个他答不上来的问题，于是便开始教他一个他完全不懂的基本真理。乌达拉卡让儿子把一块盐放进水里，第二天早上再来告诉他。当父亲让他拿出盐时，斯雷塔凯图却找不到，因为盐已经完全溶解了。乌达拉卡开始质问他：

This divine power would be utterly alien were it not for the fact that it also pervades, sustains and inspires us. The techniques of Yoga had made people aware of an inner world. These disciplines of posture, breathing, diet and mental concentration have also been developed independently in other cultures, as we shall see, and seem to produce an experience of enlightenment and illumination which have been interpreted differently but which seem natural to humanity. The Upanishads claimed that this experience of a new dimension of self was the same holy power that sustained the rest of the world. The eternal principle within each individual was called Atman: it was a new version of the old holistic vision of paganism, a rediscovery in new terms of the One Life within us and abroad which was essentially divine. The Chandoga Upanishad explains this in the parable of the salt. A young man called Sretaketu had studied the Vedas for twelve years and was rather full of himself. His father, Uddalaka, asked him a question which he was unable to answer, and then proceeded to teach him a lesson about the fundamental truth of which he was entirely ignorant. He told his son to put a piece of salt into water and report back to him the following morning. When his father asked him to produce the salt, Sretaketu could not find it because it had completely dissolved. Uddalaka began to question him:

因此，即便我们无法看见，梵天也遍及世界，并且作为阿特曼，永恒地存在于我们每个人之内^。28

Thus, even though we cannot see it, Brahman pervades the world and, as Atman, is found eternally within each one of us.²⁸

阿特曼阻止了神成为偶像，成为“外在的”实在，成为我们自身恐惧和欲望的投射。在印度教中，神并非被视为附加于我们所知世界的存在，因此，祂也并非与世界同一。我们无法通过理性来理解祂。祂只能通过一种无法用言语或概念表达的体验（anubhara）向我们“揭示”。梵是“无法用言语表达，却又能用言语表达之物……无法用心智思考，却又能用心智思考之物”。 ²⁹我们不可能与如此内在的神对话，也不可能思考祂，使祂成为单纯的思维对象。祂是一种实在，只能在超越自我的原始意义上的狂喜中才能被感知：神。

Atman prevented God from becoming an idol, an exterior Reality “out there,” a projection of our own fears and desires. God is not seen in Hinduism as a Being added on to the world as we know it, therefore, nor is it identical with the world. There was no way that we could fathom this out by reason. It is only “revealed” to us by an experience (anubhara) which cannot be expressed in words or concepts. Brahman is “What cannot be spoken in words, but that whereby words are spoken … What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think.”²⁹ It is impossible to speak to a God that is as immanent as this or to think about it, making it a mere object of thought. It is a Reality that can only be discerned in ecstasy in the original sense of going beyond the self: God

如同神祇一般，理性并非被否定，而是被超越。梵天或阿特曼的体验，如同音乐或诗歌一样，无法用理性来解释。智慧对于创作和欣赏此类艺术作品固然必要，但它所提供的体验却超越了纯粹的逻辑或理性能力。这也将是神性历史中一个永恒的主题。

Like the gods, reason is not denied but transcended. The experience of Brahman or Atman cannot be explained rationally any more than a piece of music or a poem. Intelligence is necessary for the making of such a work of art and its appreciation, but it offers an experience that goes beyond the purely logical or cerebral faculty. This will also be a constant theme in the history of God.

个人超越的理想体现在瑜伽士身上，他们离开家庭，放弃一切社会关系和责任，寻求觉悟，将自己置于另一个存在境界。大约在公元前538年，一位名叫悉达多·乔达摩的年轻人也离开了美丽的妻子、儿子以及位于贝拿勒斯以北约100英里处的迦毗罗卫城的豪华住宅，成为了一名托钵苦行僧。他被世间苦难的景象所震惊，渴望找到终结痛苦的秘诀——他能感受到痛苦无处不在。六年间，他侍奉于多位印度教上师的脚下，进行着令人胆寒的苦修，却毫无进展。圣贤的教义对他毫无吸引力，苦行反而让他更加绝望。直到有一天晚上，他彻底放弃了这些方法，进入冥想状态，才最终获得觉悟。整个宇宙欢欣鼓舞，大地震动，鲜花从天而降，芬芳的微风吹拂，诸神在各自的天界也欢欣雀跃。然而，正如异教徒的想象，神灵、自然和人类再次紧密相连，彼此和谐共处。人们燃起了摆脱苦难、证得涅槃——即终结痛苦——的新希望。乔达摩·悉达多成为了佛陀，觉悟者。起初，魔罗诱惑他留在原地，享受这新生的喜悦：他认为传播教义毫无意义，因为无人会相信。但传统神话中的两位神祇——梵天和天神之主释迦牟尼——前来拜见佛陀，恳求他向世人阐释自己的修行方法。佛陀应允了，并在接下来的四十五年里，跋涉于印度各地，宣讲他的教义：在这个充满苦难的世界里，唯有一件事是永恒不变的。那就是佛法，即关于正确生活的真理，唯有它才能使我们摆脱痛苦。

The ideal of personal transcendence was embodied in the Yogi, who would leave his family and abandon all social ties and responsibilities to seek enlightenment, putting himself in another realm of being. In about 538 BCE, a young man named Siddhartha Gautama also left his beautiful wife, his son, his luxurious home in Kapilavashtu, about 100 miles north of Benares, and became a mendicant ascetic. He had been appalled by the spectacle of suffering and wanted to discover the secret to end the pain of existence that he could see in everything around him. For six years, he sat at the feet of various Hindu gurus and undertook fearful penances, but made no headway. The doctrines of the sages did not appeal to him, and his mortifications had simply made him despair. It was not until he abandoned these methods completely and put himself into a trance one night that he gained enlightenment. The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced. Yet again, as in the pagan vision, the gods, nature and mankind were bound together in sympathy. There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. At first, the demon Mara tempted him to stay where he was and enjoy his newfound bliss: it was no use trying to spread the word because nobody would believe him. But two of the gods of the traditional pantheon—Maha Brahma and Sakra, Lord of the devas—came to the Buddha and begged him to explain his method to the world. The Buddha agreed and for the next forty-five years he tramped all over India, preaching his message: in this world of suffering, only one thing was stable and firm. This was Dharma, the truth about right living, which alone could free us from pain.

这与神无关。佛陀虽然深信诸神的存在，因为诸神是他文化传承的一部分，但他并不认为诸神对人类有多大用处。诸神也同样身处痛苦和变幻的轮回之中；他们并未帮助他证得觉悟；他们和其他众生一样，都卷入了生死轮回，最终也会消逝。然而，在他人生的关键时刻——例如他决定宣讲佛法之时——他却想象诸神影响着他，并扮演着积极的角色。因此，佛陀并非否定诸神的存在，而是相信涅槃的终极实相高于诸神。当佛教徒在禅修中体验到极乐或超脱之感时，他们并不认为这是与超自然存在接触的结果。这种状态是人类与生俱来的；任何以正确的方式生活并学习瑜伽技巧的人都能达到这种境界。因此，佛陀并没有要求弟子们依赖神明，而是敦促他们自救。

This was nothing to do with God. The Buddha believed implicitly in the existence of the gods since they were a part of his cultural baggage, but he did not believe them to be much use to mankind. They too were caught up in the realm of pain and flux; they had not helped him to achieve enlightenment; they were involved in the cycle of rebirth like all other beings and eventually they would disappear. Yet at crucial moments of his life—as when he made the decision to preach his message—he imagined the gods influencing him and playing an active role. The Buddha did not deny the gods, therefore, but believed that the ultimate Reality of nirvana was higher than the gods. When Buddhists experience bliss or a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being. Such states are natural to humanity; they can be attained by anybody who lives in the correct way and learns the techniques of Yoga. Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves.

佛陀证悟后在贝拿勒斯会见第一批弟子时，阐述了他的体系，其核心在于一个基本事实：一切存在皆是苦（dukkha）。它完全由痛苦构成；生命完全失序。万物在无意义的流逝中来来去去。没有任何事物具有永恒的意义。宗教始于对某种事物错误的认知。在异教时代，这种认知催生了一个神话，即存在一个与我们自身世界相对应的神圣原型世界，这个世界能够将自身的力量赋予人类。佛陀教导说，通过慈悲地对待一切众生，言行举止温和友善，并远离任何会蒙蔽心智的事物，例如毒品或麻醉品，就可以从苦中解脱。佛陀并没有声称自己发明了这套体系。他坚持说，他发现了它：“我见过一条古老的道路，一条古老的道路，是过去时代的佛陀走过的。” ³¹ 如同异教律法一样，它与存在的本质结构紧密相连，蕴含于生命本身的境况之中。它具有客观真实性，并非因为能够通过逻辑论证来证明，而是因为任何认真尝试践行这种生活方式的人都会发现它行之有效。有效性而非哲学或历史论证，一直是成功宗教的标志：几个世纪以来，世界各地的佛教徒都发现，这种生活方式确实能带来一种超越世俗的意义感。

When he met his first disciples at Benares after his enlightenment, the Buddha outlined his system, which was based on one essential fact: all existence was dukkha. It consisted entirely of suffering; life was wholly awry. Things come and go in meaningless flux. Nothing has permanent significance. Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong. In pagan antiquity it had led to the myth of a divine, archetypal world corresponding to our own which could impart its strength to humanity. The Buddha taught that it was possible to gain release from dukkha by living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind. The Buddha did not claim to have invented this system. He insisted that he had discovered it: “I have seen an ancient path, an ancient Road, trodden by Buddhas of a bygone age.”³¹ Like the laws of paganism, it was bound up with the essential structure of existence, inherent in the condition of life itself. It had objective reality not because it could be demonstrated by logical proof but because anybody who seriously tried to live that way would find that it worked. Effectiveness rather than philosophical or historical demonstration has always been the hallmark of a successful religion: for centuries Buddhists in many parts of the world have found that this lifestyle does yield a sense of transcendent meaning.

业力使男女陷入无尽的轮回，经历一系列痛苦的生命。但如果他们能够改掉自私的态度，就能改变命运。佛陀将轮回的过程比作一团火焰点燃一盏灯，再从这盏灯中点燃第二盏灯，如此循环往复，直到火焰熄灭。如果有人临终时仍怀有错误的观念，他或她只会点燃另一盏灯。但如果火焰熄灭，痛苦的轮回就会终止，涅槃就会到来。“涅槃”字面意思是“冷却”或“退出”。然而，它并非仅仅是一种消极的状态，而是在佛教生活中扮演着类似于上帝的角色。正如爱德华·康兹在《佛教：其本质与发展》一书中解释的那样，佛教徒经常使用与有神论者相同的意象来描述涅槃——终极的实相：

Karma bound men and women to an endless cycle of rebirth into a series of painful lives. But if they could reform their egotistic attitudes, they could change their destiny. The Buddha compared the process of rebirth to a flame which lights a lamp, from which a second lamp is lit, and so on until the flame is extinguished. If somebody is still aflame at death with a wrong attitude, he or she will simply light another lamp. But if the fire is put out, the cycle of suffering will cease and nirvana will be attained. “Nirvana” literally means “cooling off” or “going out.” It is not a merely negative state, however, but plays a role in Buddhist life that is analogous to God. As Edward Conze explains in Buddhism: its Essence and Development, Buddhists often use the same imagery as theists to describe nirvana, the ultimate reality:

一些佛教徒可能会反对这种比较，因为他们认为“神”的概念过于局限，无法表达他们对终极实在的理解。这主要是因为有神论者对“神”一词的使用过于狭隘，他们通常用这个词来指代一个与我们并无太大区别的存在。如同奥义书中的圣贤一样，佛陀坚持认为，涅槃不能像其他任何人类现实那样去定义或讨论。

Some Buddhists might object to this comparison because they find the concept of “God” too limiting to express their conception of ultimate reality. This is largely because theists use the word “God” in a limited way to refer to a being who is not very different from us. Like the sages of the Upanishads, the Buddha insisted that nirvana could not be defined or discussed as though it were any other human reality.

证得涅槃并非如基督徒通常理解的“升入天堂”。佛陀始终拒绝回答有关涅槃或其他终极问题，因为他认为这些问题“不恰当”或“不合适”。我们无法定义涅槃，因为我们的语言和概念都无法完全诠释它。都与感官和变幻莫测的世界紧密相连。经验是唯一可靠的“证明”。他的弟子们之所以知道涅槃的存在，仅仅是因为他们对美好生活的实践使他们能够瞥见涅槃。

Attaining nirvana is not like “going to heaven” as Christians often understand it. The Buddha always refused to answer questions about nirvana or other ultimate matters because they were “improper” or “inappropriate.” We could not define nirvana because our words and concepts are tied to the world of sense and flux. Experience was the only reliable “proof.” His disciples would know that nirvana existed simply because their practice of the good life would enable them to glimpse it.

他的僧侣们不应该揣测涅槃的本质。佛陀所能做的，只是为他们提供一艘筏子，带他们渡过彼岸。当有人问，证得涅槃的佛陀死后是否还活着时，他以“不恰当”为由驳回了这个问题。这就像问火焰“熄灭”后会往哪个方向燃烧一样。说佛陀在涅槃中存在，和说他不存在一样都是错误的：“存在”一词与我们所能理解的任何状态都没有关联。我们会发现，几个世纪以来，犹太教徒、基督教徒和穆斯林对“上帝是否存在”这个问题都给出了同样的答案。佛陀试图表明，语言无法处理超越概念和理性的现实。他并没有否定理性，而是强调清晰准确的思考和语言运用的重要性。然而，最终他认为，一个人的神学或信仰，就像他参与的仪式一样，都无关紧要。它们或许有趣，但并非最终意义所在。唯一重要的是美好生活；如果佛教徒尝试过，他们就会发现佛法是真理，即使他们无法用逻辑语言表达这一真理。

His monks should not speculate about the nature of nirvana. All that the Buddha could do was provide them with a raft to take them across to “the farther shore.” When asked if a Buddha who had attained nirvana lived after death, he dismissed the question as “improper.” It was like asking what direction a flame went when it “went out.” It was equally wrong to say that a Buddha existed in nirvana as that he did not exist: the word “exist” bore no relation to any state that we can understand. We shall find that over the centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims have made the same reply to the question of the “existence” of God. The Buddha was trying to show that language was not equipped to deal with a reality that lay beyond concepts and reason. Again, he did not deny reason but insisted on the importance of clear and accurate thinking and use of language. Ultimately, however, he held that a person’s theology or beliefs, like the ritual he took part in, were unimportant. They could be interesting but not a matter of final significance. The only thing that counted was the good life; if it were attempted, Buddhists would find that the Dharma was true, even if they could not express this truth in logical terms.

另一方面，希腊人对逻辑和理性充满热情。柏拉图（约公元前428年—约公元前348年）毕生致力于认识论和智慧本质的问题。他早期的大部分著作都致力于为苏格拉底辩护。苏格拉底以其发人深省的问题迫使人们澄清自己的思想，却在公元前399年因不敬神明和败坏青年而被处以死刑。与印度人颇为相似，柏拉图对旧有的宗教节日和神话感到不满，认为它们有损尊严且不合时宜。柏拉图也受到了其他一些思想的影响。公元前六世纪的哲学家毕达哥拉斯可能受到了印度思想的影响，这些思想经由波斯和埃及传播开来。他认为灵魂是堕落的、被玷污的神灵，如同被囚禁在坟墓中一般被禁锢于肉体之中，注定要经历永无止境的轮回。他阐述了人类普遍的体验：身处一个似乎与我们本性不符的世界，感到格格不入。毕达哥拉斯教导说，灵魂可以通过仪式性的净化获得解脱，从而与有序的宇宙和谐共处。柏拉图也相信存在一个超越感官世界的神圣永恒实在，灵魂是堕落的神灵，脱离了其本性，被囚禁于肉体之中，但可以通过净化心灵的理性能力来重获神性。在著名的洞穴寓言中，柏拉图描述了人类在尘世生活的黑暗与晦涩：他只能感知到永恒实在在洞穴墙壁上闪烁的影子。但通过让他的心适应神圣之光，他可以逐渐被引导出来，获得启迪和解脱。

The Greeks, on the other hand, were passionately interested in logic and reason. Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 BCE) was continually occupied with problems of epistemology and the nature of wisdom. Much of his early work was devoted to the defense of Socrates, who had forced men to clarify their ideas by his thought-provoking questions but had been sentenced to death in 399 on the charges of impiety and the corruption of youth. In a way that was not dissimilar to that of the people of India, he had become dissatisfied with the old festivals and myths of religion, which he found demeaning and inappropriate. Plato had also been influenced by the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras, who may have been influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt. He had believed that the soul was a fallen, polluted deity incarcerated in the body as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth. He had articulated the common human experience of feeling a stranger in a world that does not seem to be our true element. Pythagoras had taught that the soul could be liberated by means of ritual purifications, which would enable it to achieve harmony with the ordered universe. Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, out of its element, imprisoned in the body but capable of regaining its divine status by the purification of the reasoning powers of the mind. In the famous myth of the cave, Plato described the darkness and obscurity of man’s life on earth: he perceives only shadows of the eternal realities flickering on the wall of the cave. But gradually he can be drawn out and achieve enlightenment and liberation by accustoming his mind to the divine light.

柏拉图晚年或许放弃了关于永恒理念的学说，但这些理念对许多一神论者来说至关重要，因为他们试图以此来表达自己对上帝的理解。这些理念是稳定、恒常的实在，能够被理性思维所把握。它们比我们感官所感知到的变幻莫测、充满缺陷的物质现象更加完整、持久和有效。世间万物只是对神圣领域中永恒理念的回响、参与或模仿。我们拥有的每一个普遍概念，例如爱、正义和美，都对应着一个理念。然而，所有理念中最高的，是至善的理念。柏拉图将古老的原型神话转化为哲学形式。他的永恒理念可以被视为神话般的神圣世界的理性版本，而世俗事物只不过是其最微弱的影子。他并未探讨上帝的本质，而是将自己局限于理念的神圣世界，尽管有时理想的美或善似乎确实代表着至高无上的实在。柏拉图坚信神圣世界是静止不变的。希腊人将运动和变化视为低级实在的标志：真正具有同一性的事物始终保持不变，以永恒和不变为特征。因此，最完美的运动是圆周运动，因为它永不停息地旋转并回到原点：环绕的天体尽可能地模仿着神圣世界。这种完全静止的神性形象对犹太教徒、基督教徒和穆斯林产生了巨大的影响，尽管它……这与启示中的上帝几乎没有共同之处，启示中的上帝不断活跃、创新，而且在圣经中，他甚至会改变主意，例如当他后悔创造了人类并决定在洪水中毁灭人类时。

Later in his life, Plato may have retreated from his doctrine of the eternal forms or ideas, but they became crucial to many monotheists when they tried to express their conception of God. These ideas were stable, constant realities which could be apprehended by the reasoning powers of the mind. They are fuller, more permanent and effective realities than the shifting, flawed material phenomena we encounter with our senses. The things of this world only echo, “participate in” or “imitate” the eternal forms in the divine realm. There is an idea corresponding to every general conception we have, such as Love, Justice and Beauty. The highest of all the forms, however, is the idea of the Good. Plato had cast the ancient myth of the archetypes into a philosophical form. His eternal ideas can be seen as a rational version of the mythical divine world, of which mundane things are the merest shadow. He did not discuss the nature of God but confined himself to the divine world of the forms, though occasionally it seems that ideal Beauty or the Good does represent a supreme reality. Plato was convinced that the divine world was static and changeless. The Greeks saw movement and change as signs of inferior reality: something that had true identity remained always the same, characterized by permanence and immutability. The most perfect motion, therefore, was the circle because it was perpetually turning and returning to its original point: the circling celestial spheres imitate the divine world as best they can. This utterly static image of divinity would have an immense influence on Jews, Christians and Muslims, even though it had little in common with the God of revelation, who is constantly active, innovative and, in the Bible, even changes his mind, as when he repents of having made man and decides to destroy the human race in the Flood.

柏拉图思想中有一种神秘主义色彩，一神论者会觉得十分契合。柏拉图的神圣理念并非“外在”的现实，而是可以在自我内部发现的。在他那部充满戏剧性的对话录《会饮篇》中，柏拉图阐述了如何将对美好肉体的爱恋净化并转化为对理想之美的狂喜冥想（theoria）。他借苏格拉底的导师狄奥提玛之口解释说，这种美是独一无二的、永恒的、绝对的，与我们在这个世界上所体验到的任何事物都截然不同：

There was a mystical aspect of Plato which monotheists would find most congenial. Plato’s divine forms were not realities “out there” but could be discovered within the self. In his dramatic dialogue the Symposium, Plato showed how love of a beautiful body could be purified and transformed into an ecstatic contemplation (theoria) of ideal Beauty. He makes Diotima, Socrates’ mentor, explain that this Beauty is unique, eternal and absolute, quite unlike anything that we experience in this world:

简而言之，像“美”这样的概念与许多有神论者所谓的“上帝”有很多共同之处。然而，尽管它具有超越性，但这些概念却存在于人类的头脑之中。我们现代人将思考视为一种活动，一种我们所做的事情。柏拉图则将其视为发生在心灵中的一种现象：思考的对象是活跃于思考者理智中的现实。如同苏格拉底一样，他将思考视为一种回忆的过程，一种对我们一直知道却遗忘之物的领悟。由于人类是堕落的神性，神圣世界的形态存在于他们之内，并能被理性“触及”，而理性并非仅仅是一种理性或脑力活动，而是对我们内在永恒现实的一种直觉把握。这一观念对历史上三大一神论宗教的神秘主义者都产生了深远的影响。

In short, an idea like Beauty has much in common with what many theists would call “God.” Yet despite its transcendence, the ideas were to be found within the mind of man. We moderns experience thinking as an activity, as something that we do. Plato envisaged it as something which happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplated them. Like Socrates, he saw thought as a process of recollection, an apprehension of something that we had always known but had forgotten. Because human beings were fallen divinities, the forms of the divine world were within them and could be “touched” by reason, which was not simply a rational or cerebral activity but an intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us. This notion would greatly influence mystics in all three of the religions of historical monotheism.

柏拉图认为宇宙本质上是理性的。这又是另一种神话或对现实的想象性理解。亚里士多德（公元前384-322年）更进一步。他是第一个认识到……重要性的人。逻辑推理是所有科学的基础，亚里士多德坚信运用这种方法可以理解宇宙。除了在被称为《形而上学》（Metaphysics）的十四篇论文中尝试从理论上理解真理（这个术语是他的编辑创造的，编辑将这些论文放在《​​物理学》之后：meta ta physika），他还研究了理论物理学和经验生物学。然而，他拥有深刻的学术谦逊，坚持认为没有人能够完全理解真理，但每个人都可以为我们共同的理解做出微小的贡献。关于他对柏拉图著作的评价一直存在诸多争议。他似乎在性格上反对柏拉图关于理念的先验观点，拒绝接受理念具有先于独立存在的观念。亚里士多德认为，理念只有在存在于我们世界中的具体物质对象中时才具有现实性。

Plato believed that the universe was essentially rational. This was another myth or imaginary conception of reality. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) took it a step further. He was the first to appreciate the importance of logical reasoning, the basis of all science, and was convinced that it was possible to arrive at an understanding of the universe by applying this method. As well as attempting a theoretical understanding of the truth in the fourteen treatises known as the Metaphysics (the term was coined by his editor, who put these treatises “after the Physics”: meta ta physika), he also studied theoretical physics and empirical biology. Yet he possessed profound intellectual humility, insisting that nobody was able to attain an adequate conception of truth but that everybody could make a small contribution to our collective understanding. There has been much controversy about his assessment of Plato’s work. He seems to have been temperamentally opposed to Plato’s transcendent view of the forms, rejecting the notion that they had a prior, independent existence. Aristotle maintained that the forms only had reality in so far as they existed in concrete, material objects in our own world.

尽管亚里士多德的思维方式务实，且专注于科学事实，但他对宗教和神话的本质及重要性却有着敏锐的理解。他指出，各种神秘宗教的信徒无需学习任何事实，“只需体验某些情感，并进入某种特定的状态。” ³⁵因此，他提出了著名的文学理论：悲剧能够净化（卡塔西斯）恐惧和怜悯等情感，从而带来重生的体验。希腊悲剧最初是宗教节日的一部分，它们并非旨在呈现历史事件的客观事实，而是试图揭示更为深刻的真理。事实上，历史比诗歌和神话更为琐碎：“前者描述已经发生的事情，后者描述可能发生的事情。因此，诗歌比历史更具哲学性和严肃性；因为诗歌讲述的是普遍性，而历史讲述的是特殊性。” ³⁶历史上或许存在过阿喀琉斯或俄狄浦斯这样的人物，或许并不存在，但他们的生平事迹与我们在荷马和索福克勒斯笔下所见的人物无关，后者表达了关于人类境况的另一种更为深刻的真理。亚里士多德对悲剧净化（katharsis）的论述，是对宗教人士（Homo religiosus）一直以来凭直觉就能理解的真理的一种哲学阐释：在日常生活中难以忍受的事件，通过象征性、神话性或仪式性的呈现，可以得到救赎，并转化为纯粹甚至愉悦的事物。

Despite his earthbound approach and his preoccupation with scientific fact, Aristotle had an acute understanding of the nature and importance of religion and mythology. He pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts “but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.”³⁵ Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth. The Greek tragedies, which originally formed part of a religious festival, did not necessarily present a factual account of historical events but were attempting to reveal a more serious truth. Indeed, history was more trivial than poetry and myth: “The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.”³⁶ There may or may not have been a historical Achilles or Oedipus, but the facts of their lives were irrelevant to the characters we have experienced in Homer and Sophocles, which express a different but more profound truth about the human condition. Aristotle’s account of the katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

亚里士多德的上帝观对后世的一神论者，尤其是西方世界的基督徒，产生了巨大的影响。在《物理学》中，他探讨了现实的本质以及宇宙的结构和物质。他发展出了一种哲学版本的……古老的流溢论认为，存在着一个层级分明的存在，每一层都赋予其下层存在以形态和变化。但与古老的神话不同，在亚里士多德的理论中，流溢的强度随着与源头距离的增加而减弱。在这个层级的顶端是“不动的推动者”，亚里士多德将其等同于上帝。这位上帝是纯粹的存在，因此是永恒的、静止的、精神性的。上帝是纯粹的思想，既是思想者又是思想本身，永恒地沉思着自身——知识的最高对象。由于物质是有缺陷且会消亡的，因此上帝或更高层次的存在中不存在物质元素。“不动的推动者”是宇宙中一切运动和活动的根源，因为每一种运动都必须有一个可以追溯到单一源头的原因。他通过一种吸引力来激活世界，因为所有存在都被吸引到“存在”本身。

Aristotle’s idea of God had an immense influence on later monotheists, particularly on Christians in the Western world. In the Physics, he had examined the nature of reality and the structure and substance of the universe. He developed what amounted to a philosophical version of the old emanation accounts of creation: there was a hierarchy of existences, each one of which imparts form and change to the one below it, but unlike the old myths, in Aristotle’s theory the emanations grew weaker the further they were from their source. At the top of this hierarchy was the Unmoved Mover, which Aristotle identified with God. This God was pure being and, as such, eternal, immobile and spiritual. God was pure thought, at one and the same time thinker and thought, engaged in an eternal moment of contemplation of himself, the highest object of knowledge. Since matter is flawed and mortal, there is no material element in God or the higher grades of being. The Unmoved Mover causes all the motion and activity in the universe, since each movement must have a cause that can be traced back to a single source. He activates the world by a process of attraction, since all beings are drawn toward Being itself.

人处于一种特殊的地位：他的人性灵魂拥有神圣的智慧天赋，这使他与上帝亲缘，并分享神性。这种神圣的理性能力使他超越了动植物。然而，作为身心合一的存在，人是整个宇宙的缩影，自身既包含宇宙最卑微的物质，也包含理性的神圣属性。人有责任通过净化自己的智慧而获得永生和神性。智慧（sophia）是人类所有美德中最高的；它体现在对哲学真理的沉思（theoria）中，正如柏拉图所言，这种沉思通过模仿上帝的活动使我们成为神。theoria并非仅靠逻辑就能获得，而是一种经过训练的直觉，最终达到一种超脱尘世的境界。然而，极少有人能够拥有这种智慧，大多数人只能达到phronesis，即在日常生活中运用远见和智慧。

Man is in a privileged position: his human soul has the divine gift of intellect, which makes him kin to God and a partaker in the divine nature. This godly capacity of reason puts him above plants and animals. As body and soul, however, man is a microcosm of the whole universe, containing within himself its basest materials as well as the divine attribute of reason. It is his duty to become immortal and divine by purifying his intellect. Wisdom (sophia) was the highest of all the human virtues; it was expressed in contemplation (theoria) of philosophical truth which, as in Plato, makes us divine by imitating the activity of God himself. Theoria was not achieved by logic alone, but was a disciplined intuition resulting in an esctatic self-transcendence. Very few people are capable of this wisdom, however, and most can achieve only phronesis, the exercise of foresight and intelligence in daily life.

尽管“不动的推动者”在亚里士多德的体系中占据重要地位，但他的上帝却几乎没有宗教意义。他没有创造世界，因为这会牵涉到不恰当的改变和时间活动。即便万物都向他趋向，这位上帝也对宇宙的存在漠不关心，因为他无法设想任何低于自身的事物。他当然不会指导或引导世界，也无法以任何方式影响我们的生活。上帝是否知晓宇宙的存在，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，因为宇宙是他存在的必然结果，源于他自身。这样的上帝是否存在的问题必然是无关紧要的。亚里士多德本人或许在晚年放弃了他的神学。作为轴心时代的人物，他和柏拉图都关注个人良知、美好生活以及社会正义问题。然而，他们的思想带有精英主义色彩。柏拉图的纯粹理念世界或亚里士多德笔下遥远的上帝对普通凡人的生活几乎没有影响，这一点后来的犹太教徒和穆斯林崇拜者也不得不承认。

Despite the important position of the Unmoved Mover in his system, Aristotle’s God had little religious relevance. He had not created the world, since this would have involved an inappropriate change and temporal activity. Even though everything yearns toward him, this God remains quite indifferent to the existence of the universe, since he cannot contemplate anything inferior to himself. He certainly does not direct or guide the world and can make no difference to our lives, one way or the other. It is an open question whether God even knows of the existence of the cosmos, which has emanated from him as a necessary effect of his existence. The question of the existence of such a God must be entirely peripheral. Aristotle himself may have abandoned his theology later in life. As men of the Axial Age, he and Plato were both concerned with the individual conscience, the good life and the question of justice in society. Yet their thought was elitist. The pure world of Plato’s forms or the remote God of Aristotle could make little impact on the lives of ordinary mortals, a fact which their later Jewish and Muslim admirers were forced to acknowledge.

因此，在轴心时代的新思想中，人们普遍认同人类生活包含着一种至关重要的超越性元素。我们所探讨的各位圣贤对这种超越性的诠释各不相同，但他们都一致认为，这种超越性对于男女发展成为完整的人至关重要。他们并没有彻底抛弃旧有的神话，而是对其进行了重新诠释，并帮助人们超越其束缚。在这些意义深远的思想形成的同时，以色列的先知们也发展出了他们自己的传统以适应不断变化的环境，最终耶和华成为了唯一的神。但是，性情暴躁的耶和华又如何能与这些其他崇高的愿景相提并论呢？

In the new ideologies of the Axial Age, therefore, there was a general agreement that human life contained a transcendent element that was essential. The various sages we have considered interpreted this transcendence differently, but they were united in seeing it as crucial to the development of men and women as full human beings. They had not jettisoned the older mythologies absolutely but reinterpreted them and helped people to rise above them. At the same time as these momentous ideologies were being formed, the prophets of Israel developed their own traditions to meet the changing conditions, with the result that Yahweh eventually became the only God. But how would irascible Yahweh measure up to these other lofty visions?

2

一位神

2

One God

我公元前742年，一位犹大王室成员在所罗门王于耶路撒冷建造的圣殿中看到了耶和华的异象。对于以色列人民来说，这是一个充满焦虑的时期。犹大王乌西雅于同年去世，其子亚哈斯继位，亚哈斯鼓励臣民在敬拜耶和华的同时敬拜其他异教神灵。北以色列王国几乎处于无政府状态：耶罗波安二世王去世后，从公元前746年到公元前736年，共有五位国王统治过以色列，而亚述王提革列比列沙三世则觊觎着他们的土地，渴望将其纳入自己不断扩张的帝国版图。公元前722年，他的继任者萨尔贡二世征服了北以色列王国，并将当地居民驱逐出境：以色列北部的十个支派被迫同化，从此消失在历史长河中，而弱小的犹大王国则为自身的存亡而忧心忡忡。乌西雅王死后不久，以赛亚在圣殿祷告时，很可能充满了不祥的预感；与此同时，他或许也隐隐感到圣殿里铺张的祭祀仪式有失妥当。以赛亚虽出身统治阶级，却持有民粹主义和民主主义的观点，并且对穷人的困境极为关注。当至圣所前的香火弥漫圣殿，祭牲的血腥味扑鼻而来时，他或许会担忧以色列的宗教已经失去了其完整性和内在意义。

IN 742 BCE, a member of the Judaean royal family had a vision of Yahweh in the Temple which King Solomon had built in Jerusalem. It was an anxious time for the people of Israel. King Uzziah of Judah had died that year and was succeeded by his son Ahaz, who would encourage his subjects to worship pagan gods alongside Yahweh. The northern Kingdom of Israel was in a state of near-anarchy: after the death of King Jeroboam II, five kings had sat on the throne between 746 and 736, while King Tigleth Pilesar III, King of Assyria, looked hungrily at their lands, which he was anxious to add to his expanding empire. In 722, his successor, King Sargon II, would conquer the northern Kingdom and deport the population: the ten northern tribes of Israel were forced to assimilate and disappeared from history, while the little Kingdom of Judah feared for its own survival. As Isaiah prayed in the Temple shortly after King Uzziah’s death, he was probably full of foreboding; at the same time he may have been uncomfortably aware of the inappropriateness of the lavish Temple ceremonial. Isaiah may have been a member of the ruling class, but he had populist and democratic views and was highly sensitive to the plight of the poor. As the incense filled the sanctuary before the Holy of Holies and the place reeked with the blood of the sacrificial animals, he may have feared that the religion of Israel had lost its integrity and inner meaning.

突然间，他仿佛看见耶和华亲自坐在天上的宝座上，宝座就在圣殿的正上方。这圣殿是他在地上天庭的复制品。耶和华的随从充满了整个圣所，两位撒拉弗侍立在他身边，他们用翅膀遮住脸，以免看见。他们彼此呼喊，齐声高唱：“圣哉！圣哉！圣哉！万军之耶和华！他的荣耀充满全地！” ^¹听到他们的声音，整个圣殿仿佛在地基上震动，烟雾弥漫，将耶和华笼罩在密不透风的云雾之中，如同西奈山上遮蔽他、使摩西看不见他的云雾一般。今天我们用“圣洁”一词，通常指的是一种道德上的卓越状态。然而，希伯来语“ kaddosh ”与道德本身无关，而是指“他者性”，一种彻底的分离。耶和华在西奈山上的显现，凸显了人与神圣世界之间突然出现的巨大鸿沟。如今，撒拉弗们高呼：“耶和华是他者！他者！他者！”以赛亚也曾体验过那种神圣的感觉，这种感觉周期性地降临在世人身上，使他们既着迷又恐惧。在鲁道夫·奥托的经典著作《神圣的理念》中，他将这种令人恐惧的超越现实体验描述为“mysterium terribile et fascinans”（可怕的、令人着迷的神秘）：之所以称之为“可怕的” ，是因为它带来深刻的冲击，使我们与常态的慰藉彻底决裂；之所以称之为“令人着迷”，是因为它矛盾地散发着一种不可抗拒的吸引力。这种压倒性的体验毫无理性可言，奥托将其比作音乐或情欲：它所引发的情感无法用语言或概念充分表达。事实上，这种“全然他者”的感知甚至不能说是“存在”的，因为它在我们正常的现实体系中无容身之地。^轴心时代的新耶和华仍然是“军队之神”（sabaoth），但他不再仅仅是一位战神。他也不再仅仅是一位偏袒以色列的部落神祇：他的荣耀不再局限于应许之地，而是遍及整个世界。

Suddenly he seemed to see Yahweh himself sitting on his throne in heaven directly above the Temple, which was the replica of his celestial court on earth. Yahweh’s train filled the sanctuary and he was attended by two seraphs, who covered their faces with their wings lest they look upon his face. They cried out to one another antiphonally: “Holy! holy! holy is Yahweh Sabaoth. His glory fills the whole earth.”¹ At the sound of their voices, the whole Temple seemed to shake on its foundations and was filled with smoke, enveloping Yahweh in an impenetrable cloud, similar to the cloud and smoke that had hidden him from Moses on Mount Sinai. When we use the word “holy” today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. The Hebrew kaddosh, however, has nothing to do with morality as such but means “otherness,” a radical separation. The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulf that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: “Yahweh is other! other! other!” Isaiah had experienced that sense of the numinous which has periodically descended upon men and women and filled them with fascination and dread. In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terribile et fascinans: it is terribile because it comes as a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because, paradoxically, it exerts an irresistible attraction. There is nothing rational about this overpowering experience, which Otto compares to that of music or the erotic: the emotions it engenders cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts. Indeed, this sense of the Wholly Other cannot even be said to “exist” because it has no place in our normal scheme of reality.² The new Yahweh of the Axial Age was still “the god of the armies” (sabaoth) but was no longer a mere god of war. Nor was he simply a tribal deity, who was passionately biased in favor of Israel: his glory was no longer confined to the Promised Land but filled the whole earth.

以赛亚并非佛陀，他没有经历带来宁静和极乐的觉悟，也没有成为完美的导师。相反，他充满了人世间的恐惧，放声痛哭：

Isaiah was no Buddha experiencing an enlightenment that brought tranquillity and bliss. He had not become the perfected teacher of men. Instead he was filled with mortal terror, crying aloud:

他被耶和华超凡的圣洁所震撼，只意识到自己的不足和礼仪上的不洁。与佛陀或瑜伽士不同，他没有通过一系列的灵修来为这种体验做准备。这体验来得猝不及防，其毁灭性的冲击让他彻底动摇。一位炽天使飞了过来。神用烧红的炭火洁净了他的嘴唇，使他能说出神的话语。许多先知要么不愿代表神说话，要么无法做到。当神从燃烧的荆棘丛中呼召摩西——所有先知的原型——并命令他作自己的使者去见法老和以色列人时，摩西曾抱怨自己“说话不好”。神体谅了他的这个缺陷，允许他的哥哥亚伦代替他说话。先知蒙召的故事中经常出现这种主题，象征着传达神的话语的艰难。^先知们并不热衷于宣扬神圣的信息，也不愿承担这项充满压力和痛苦的使命。将以色列的神转化为超越力量的象征，并非一个平静安宁的过程，而是伴随着痛苦和挣扎。

Overcome by the transcendent holiness of Yahweh, he was conscious only of his own inadequacy and ritual impurity. Unlike the Buddha or a Yogi, he had not prepared himself for this experience by a series of spiritual exercises. It had come upon him out of the blue and he was completely shaken by its devastating impact. One of the seraphs flew toward him with a live coal and purified his lips, so that they could utter the word of God. Many of the prophets were either unwilling to speak on God’s behalf or unable to do so. When God had called Moses, prototype of all prophets, from the Burning Bush and commanded him to be his messenger to Pharaoh and the children of Israel, Moses had protested that he was “not able to speak well.”⁴ God had made allowances for this impediment and permitted his brother, Aaron, to speak in Moses’ stead. This regular motif in the stories of prophetic vocations symbolizes the difficulty of speaking God’s word. The prophets were not eager to proclaim the divine message and were reluctant to undertake a mission of great strain and anguish. The transformation of Israel’s God into a symbol of transcendent power would not be a calm, serene process but attended with pain and struggle.

印度教徒绝不会将梵天描述为一位伟大的君王，因为他们的神无法用如此人类的语言来描述。我们必须谨慎，不要对以赛亚的异象进行过于字面的解读：这是一种试图描述不可言说之事的尝试，以赛亚本能地诉诸于他民族的神话传统，以便让听众对他所经历的一切有所了解。诗篇中常常将耶和华描述为君王，端坐于圣殿之中，正如邻邦的神祇巴力、玛尔杜克和达贡一样，他们也如同君王^一般，在各自相似的神殿中统治着一切。然而，在这些神话意象之下，以色列人开始萌生一种截然不同的终极实在观：与这位神相遇，就如同与一位有位格的人相遇。尽管耶和华具有令人敬畏的异质性，但他能够说话，以赛亚也能回应。对于奥义书的圣贤来说，这同样是不可想象的，因为与梵天-灵魂对话或会面的想法是不恰当的拟人化。

Hindus would never have described Brahman as a great king because their God could not be described in such human terms. We must be careful not to interpret the story of Isaiah’s vision too literally: it is an attempt to describe the indescribable, and Isaiah reverts instinctively to the mythological traditions of his people to give his audience some idea of what had happened to him. The psalms often describe Yahweh enthroned in his temple as king, just as Baal, Marduk and Dagon,⁵ the gods of their neighbors, presided as monarchs in their rather similar temples. Beneath the mythological imagery, however, a quite distinctive conception of the ultimate reality was beginning to emerge in Israel: the experience with this God is an encounter with a person. Despite his terrifying otherness, Yahweh can speak and Isaiah can answer. Again, this would have been inconceivable to the sages of the Upanishads, since the idea of having a dialogue or meeting with Brahman-Atman would be inappropriately anthropomorphic.

耶和华问道：“我可以差遣谁呢？谁愿意作我们的使者呢？”以赛亚像之前的摩西一样，立刻回答说：“我在这里！（hineni！）差遣我吧！”这个异象的目的并非启迪先知，而是赋予他一项实际的任务。先知首先是站在上帝面前的人，但这种超越的体验并非像佛教那样传授知识，而是付诸行动。先知的特征不是神秘的启示，而是顺服。正如人们所预料的那样，这信息从来都不容易理解。耶和华以典型的闪族悖论告诉以赛亚，人们不会接受它：当他们拒绝上帝的话语时，他不必灰心丧气：“你去告诉这百姓说：‘你们听了又听，却不明白；看了又看，却不晓得。’” ^⁶七百年后，耶稣当人们拒绝聆听他同样严厉的信息时，他便会引用这些话。7^人类无法承受太多的现实。以赛亚时代的以色列人正处于战争和灭绝的边缘，耶和华没有给他们带来任何喜讯：他们的城市将被摧毁，乡村将被蹂躏，房屋将被洗劫一空。以赛亚将亲眼目睹北国在公元前722年的覆灭和十个支派的流放。公元前701年，西拿基立率领庞大的亚述军队入侵犹大，围攻了犹大46座城市和要塞，将守军将领钉在木桩上，掳走约2000人，并将犹太国王囚禁在耶路撒冷，“如同笼中之鸟”。8^以赛亚肩负着一项吃力不讨好的任务：警告他的子民即将到来的灾难。

Yahweh asked: “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?” and, like Moses before him, Isaiah immediately replied: “Here I am! (hineni!) send me!” The point of this vision was not to enlighten the prophet but to give him a practical job to do. Primarily the prophet is one who stands in God’s presence, but this experience of transcendence results not in the imparting of knowledge—as in Buddhism—but in action. The prophet will not be characterized by mystical illumination but by obedience. As one might expect, the message is never easy. With typical Semitic paradox, Yahweh told Isaiah that the people would not accept it: he must not be dismayed when they reject God’s words: “Go and say to this people: ‘Hear and hear again, but do not understand; see and see again, but do not perceive.’ ”⁶ Seven hundred years later, Jesus would quote these words when people refused to hear his equally tough message.⁷ Humankind cannot bear very much reality. The Israelites of Isaiah’s day were on the brink of war and extinction, and Yahweh had no cheerful message for them: their cities would be devastated, the countryside ravaged and the houses emptied of their inhabitants. Isaiah would live to see the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 and the deportation of the ten tribes. In 701 Sennacherib would invade Judah with a vast Assyrian army, lay siege to forty-six of its cities and fortresses, impale the defending officers on poles, deport about 2000 people and imprison the Jewish king in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.”⁸ Isaiah had the thankless task of warning his people of these impending catastrophes:

任何一位敏锐的政治观察家都不难预见到这些灾难。以赛亚的信息中令人不寒而栗的独到之处在于他对局势的分析。摩西时代那位带有党派偏见的上帝会将亚述视为敌人；而以赛亚的上帝则视亚述为祂的工具。将以色列人驱逐出境、蹂躏这片土地的，并非萨尔贡二世和西拿基立，而是“耶和华将百姓赶出去”。 ¹⁰

It would not have been difficult for any astute political observer to foresee these catastrophes. What was chillingly original in Isaiah’s message was his analysis of the situation. The old partisan God of Moses would have cast Assyria in the role of the enemy; the God of Isaiah saw Assyria as his instrument. It was not Sargon II and Sennacherib who would drive the Israelites into exile and devastate the country. It is “Yahweh who drives the people out.”¹⁰

这是轴心时代先知们信息中反复出现的主题。以色列的上帝最初区别于异教神祇的方式，是在具体的时事中显现自身，而不仅仅是在神话和礼仪中。如今，新一代的先知们坚持认为，政治灾难和胜利都揭示了这位正在成为历史主宰的上帝。他掌控着所有国家。亚述最终也会走向毁灭，仅仅是因为它的君王没有意识到，他们只不过是比他们更伟大的存在手中的工具。 ¹¹既然耶和华预言了亚述的最终毁灭，未来便还有一线希望。但没有哪个以色列人愿意听到，自己的同胞因目光短浅的政策和剥削行为而自取灭亡。也没有人会乐于听到，耶和华策划了公元前722年和701年亚述战役的胜利，正如他曾统领约书亚、基甸和大卫王的军队一样。他以为自己在对这个本应是他选民的国家做什么？根本没有。以赛亚对耶和华的描述满足了人们的愿望。耶和华并没有给人们提供万灵药，而是被用来迫使人们直面不愿面对的现实。先知们，例如以赛亚，并没有让人们沉溺于将他们带回神话时代的古老宗教仪式中，而是试图让他们的同胞正视历史的真实事件，并将其视为与上帝之间一场令人敬畏的对话。

This was a constant theme in the message of the prophets of the Axial Age. The God of Israel had originally distinguished himself from the pagan deities by revealing himself in concrete current events, not simply in mythology and liturgy. Now, the new prophets insisted, political catastrophe as well as victory revealed the God who was becoming the lord and master of history. He had all the nations in his pocket. Assyria would come to grief in its turn simply because its kings had not realized that they were only tools in the hand of a being greater than themselves.¹¹ Since Yahweh had foretold the ultimate destruction of Assyria, there was a distant hope for the future. But no Israelite would have wanted to hear that his own people had brought political destruction upon its own head by its shortsighted policies and exploitative behavior. Nobody would have been happy to hear that Yahweh had masterminded the successful Assyrian campaigns of 722 and 701, just as he had captained the armies of Joshua, Gideon and King David. What did he think he was doing with the nation that was supposed to be his Chosen People? There was no wish fulfillment in Isaiah’s depiction of Yahweh. Instead of offering the people a panacea, Yahweh was being used to make people confront unwelcome reality. Instead of taking refuge in the old cultic observances which projected people back into mythical time, prophets like Isaiah were trying to make their countrymen look the actual events of history in the face and accept them as a terrifying dialogue with their God.

摩西的上帝是凯旋的，而以赛亚的上帝却充满悲伤。流传至今的预言，以一段对立约之民极其不敬的哀叹开篇：牛和驴都认识它们的主人，但“以色列一无所知，我的百姓一无所知”。 ¹² 耶和华极其厌恶圣殿中的动物献祭，厌恶牛犊的脂肪、公牛和山羊的血，以及燔祭中冒出的恶臭血腥味。他无法忍受他们的节期、新年庆典和朝圣活动。 ¹³这在以赛亚的听众看来是何等的震撼：在中东，这些祭祀庆典是宗教的核心。异教神祇依靠这些仪式来恢复其衰弱的能量；他们的威望也部分取决于其神庙的宏伟壮丽。耶和华实际上是在说，这些事毫无意义。如同《奥伊库梅内》中的其他智者和哲学家一样，以赛亚认为外在的遵守是不够的。以色列人必须发现他们宗教的内在意义。耶和华想要的是怜悯，而不是献祭。

While the God of Moses had been triumphalist, the God of Isaiah was full of sorrow. The prophecy, as it has come down to us, begins with a lament that is highly unflattering to the people of the covenant: the ox and the ass know their owners, but “Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing.”¹² Yahweh was utterly revolted by the animal sacrifices in the Temple, sickened by the fat of calves, blood of bulls and goats and the reeking blood that smoked from the holocausts. He could not bear their festivals, New Year ceremonies and pilgrimages.¹³ This would have shocked Isaiah’s audience: in the Middle East these cultic celebrations were of the essence of religion. The pagan gods depended upon the ceremonies to renew their depleted energies; their prestige depended in part upon the magnificence of their temples. Now Yahweh was actually saying that these things were utterly meaningless. Like other sages and philosophers in the Oikumene, Isaiah felt that exterior observance was not enough. Israelites must discover the inner meaning of their religion. Yahweh wanted compassion rather than sacrifice:

先知们亲身领悟了慈悲至高无上的使命，这将成为轴心时代所有主要宗教的标志。这一时期在奥伊库梅内（Oikumene，印度教民族主义中心）发展起来的新意识形态都坚持认为，检验宗教真实性的试金石在于宗教体验能否成功地融入日常生活。仅仅将修行局限于寺庙和超脱尘世的神话世界已远远不够。开悟之后，男女必须回归世俗生活，对一切众生践行慈悲。

The prophets had discovered for themselves the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the major religions formed in the Axial Age. The new ideologies that were developing in the Oikumene during this period all insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. It was no longer sufficient to comfine observance to the Temple and to the extratemporal world of myth. After enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and practice compassion for all living beings.

自西奈山以来，先知们的社会理想就隐含在耶和华的崇拜之中：出埃及记的故事强调上帝站在弱者和受压迫者一边。不同之处在于，如今以色列人自己却被斥为压迫者。在以赛亚预言异象之时，已有两位先知在混乱的北国宣讲类似的信息。第一位是阿摩司，他不像以赛亚那样出身贵族，而是一位牧羊人，原本居住在南国提哥亚。大约在公元前752年，阿摩司也受到突如其来的使命感驱使，来到北国以色列。他闯入古老的伯特利圣所，以末日预言打破了那里的礼仪。伯特利的祭司亚玛谢试图将他赶走。我们从他对粗鲁牧人的傲慢斥责中，可以听出权贵阶层的优越感。他理所当然地认为阿摩司是某个算命师行会的成员，靠着成群结队地四处游荡、算命为生。“滚开，先知！”他轻蔑地说，“回到犹大地去，在那里挣你的饭，在那里说你的预言。我们不需要你在伯特利再说预言；这里是皇家圣所，是国家的圣殿。”阿摩司毫不畏惧地挺直身子，轻蔑地回答说，他并非行会先知，而是直接受耶和华的委派：“我不是先知，也不属于任何先知的行会。我本是牧羊人，照管桑树；是耶和华将我从牧羊中拣选出来，耶和华说：‘你去向我的百姓以色列说预言。’” 15伯特利的人不想听耶和华的话吗？好吧，耶和华又给他们一个预言：他们的妻子将被迫流落街头，他们的孩子将被屠杀，他们自己也将在远离以色列地的流亡中死去^。

The social ideal of the prophets had been implicit in the cult of Yahweh since Sinai: the story of the Exodus had stressed that God was on the side of the weak and oppressed. The difference was that now Israelites themselves were castigated as oppressors. At the time of Isaiah’s prophetic vision, two prophets were already preaching a similar message in the chaotic northern kingdom. The first was Amos, who was no aristocrat like Isaiah but a shepherd who had originally lived in Tekoa in the southern kingdom. In about 752, Amos had also been overwhelmed by a sudden imperative that had swept him to the kingdom of Israel in the north. He had burst into the ancient shrine of Beth-El and shattered the ceremonial there with a prophecy of doom. Amaziah, the priest of Beth-El, had tried to send him away. We can hear the superior voice of the establishment in his pompous rebuke to the uncouth herdsman. He naturally imagined that Amos belonged to one of the guilds of soothsayers, who wandered around in groups telling fortunes for a living. “Go away, seer!” he said disdainfully. “Get back to the land of Judah; earn your bread there, do your prophesying there. We want no more prophesying in Beth-El; this is the royal sanctuary, the national temple.” Unabashed, Amos drew himself to his full height and replied scornfully that he was no guild prophet but had a direct mandate from Yahweh: “I was no prophet, neither did I belong to any of the brotherhoods of prophets. I was a shepherd and looking after sycamores: but it was Yahweh who took me from herding the flock and Yahweh who said: ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ ”¹⁵ So the people of Beth-El did not want to hear Yahweh’s message? Very well, he had another oracle for them: their wives would be forced onto the streets, their children slaughtered, and they themselves would die in exile, far from the land of Israel.

先知的本质在于独处。像阿摩司这样的人物，终究是孤身一人；他打破了以往的生活节奏和职责。这并非他主动选择，而是命中注定。他似乎被强行从正常的意识模式中拽了出来，再也无法像往常那样掌控自己的行为。无论他是否愿意，他都被迫去预言。正如阿摩司所说：

It was of the essence of the prophet to be solitary. A figure like Amos was on his own; he had broken with the rhythms and duties of his past. This was not something he had chosen but something that had happened to him. It seemed as though he had been jerked out of the normal patterns of consciousness and could no longer operate the usual controls. He was forced to prophesy, whether he wanted to or not. As Amos put it:

阿摩司不像佛陀那样完全沉浸于涅槃的无私奉献之中；相反，耶和华取代了他的自我，将他带入了另一个世界。阿摩司是第一位强调社会正义和慈悲重要性的先知。如同佛陀一样，他深切地感受到人类苦难的煎熬。在阿摩司的预言中，耶和华代表受压迫者发声，为那些无声无息、无力发声的穷人代言。在他流传至今的预言的第一句话中，耶和华在耶路撒冷的圣殿里发出震怒的咆哮，他目睹了近东各国，包括犹大和以色列的苦难。以色列人与外邦人一样罪恶：他们或许能够对穷人的残酷和压迫视而不见，但耶和华却不能。他记录了他们所有的欺诈、剥削和令人震惊的冷酷无情：“耶和华指着雅各的骄傲起誓：‘我永不忘记你们所行的一切。’” ¹⁷他们真的竟敢盼望耶和华的日子，那时耶和华要高举以色列，羞辱外邦人吗？他们即将遭受打击：“耶和华的日子对你们意味着什么？那日必是黑暗，不是光明！” ¹⁸他们以为自己是上帝的选民吗？他们完全误解了圣约的本质，圣约意味着责任，而不是特权：“以色列人哪，要听！耶和华这样宣告要责备你们！”阿摩司喊道：“责备我从埃及地领出来的全家：

Amos had not been absorbed like the Buddha into the selfless annihilation of nirvana; instead, Yahweh had taken the place of his ego and snatched him into another world. Amos was the first of the prophets to emphasize the importance of social justice and compassion. Like the Buddha, he was acutely aware of the agony of suffering humanity. In Amos’s oracles, Yahweh was speaking on behalf of the oppressed, giving voice to the voiceless, impotent suffering of the poor. In the very first line of his prophecy as it has come down to us, Yahweh is roaring with horror from his Temple in Jerusalem as he contemplates the misery in all the countries of the Near East, including Judah and Israel. The people of Israel were just as bad as the goyim, the Gentiles: they might be able to ignore the cruelty and oppression of the poor, but Yahweh could not. He noted every instance of swindling, exploitation and breathtaking lack of compassion: “Yahweh swears it by the pride of Jacob: ‘Never will I forget a single thing that you have done.’ ”¹⁷ Did they really have the temerity to look forward to the Day of the Lord, when Yahweh would exalt Israel and humiliate the goyim? They had a shock coming: “What will this Day of Yahweh mean to you? It will mean darkness, not light!”¹⁸ They thought they were God’s Chosen People? They had entirely misunderstood the nature of the covenant, which meant responsibility, not privilege: “Listen sons of Israel, to this oracle Yahweh speaks against you!” Amos cried, “against the whole family I brought out of the land of Egypt:

这约意味着所有以色列人都是上帝的选民，因此理应受到善待。上帝介入历史并非仅仅为了荣耀以色列，而是为了维护社会正义。这是他介入历史的根本目的，如有必要，他甚至会动用亚述军队在自己的土地上伸张正义。

The covenant meant that all the people of Israel were God’s elect and had, therefore, to be treated decently. God did not simply intervene in history to glorify Israel but to secure social justice. This was his stake in history and, if need be, he would use the Assyrian army to enforce justice in his own land.

不出所料，大多数以色列人拒绝了先知与耶和华对话的邀请。他们更倾向于在耶路撒冷圣殿或迦南古老的生育崇拜中，遵循较为温和的宗教仪式。这种情况至今依然存在：信奉慈悲宗教的人寥寥无几；大多数信徒满足于在犹太会堂、教堂、圣殿和清真寺进行庄重的礼拜。古老的迦南宗教在以色列仍然盛行。公元十世纪，耶罗波安一世国王在耶路撒冷设立了两尊祭祀公牛的雕像。但和伯特利的圣所。两百年后，以色列人仍然在那里举行生育仪式和神圣的性爱，正如我们在先知何西阿（阿摩司的同代人）的预言中所见。20一些以色列人似乎认为耶和华像其他神一样有妻子：考古学家最近发掘出一些铭文^，上面写着“献给耶和华和他的亚舍拉”。以色列人因敬拜巴力等其他神而违背盟约，这尤其令何西阿感到不安。像所有新先知一样，他关注宗教的内在意义。正如他让耶和华说：“我所要的乃是爱（hesed ），不是献祭；认识神（daath Elohim），不是燔祭。” ²¹他指的并非神学知识： daath一词源于希伯来语动词yada，意为“知道”，带有性方面的含义。因此，J说亚当“认识”了他的妻子夏娃。22在古迦南人的宗教中，巴力与土地结合，人们为此举行盛大^的祭祀狂欢，但何西阿坚持认为，自从立约以来，耶和华取代了巴力，与以色列人结合。他们必须明白，是耶和华，而不是巴力，才能使土地丰饶。23^他仍然像情人一样追求以色列，决心将她从引诱她的巴力手中拉回来：

Not surprisingly, most Israelites declined the prophet’s invitation to enter into a dialogue with Yahweh. They preferred a less demanding religion of cultic observance either in the Jerusalem Temple or in the old fertility cults of Canaan. This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque. The ancient Canaanite religions were still flourishing in Israel. In the tenth century, King Jeroboam I had set up two cultic bulls at the sanctuaries of Dan and Beth-El. Two hundred years later, the Israelites were still taking part in fertility rites and sacred sex there, as we see in the oracles of the prophet Hosea, Amos’s contemporary.²⁰ Some Israelites appear to have thought that Yahweh had a wife, like the other gods: archaeologists have recently unearthed inscriptions dedicated “To Yahweh and his Asherah.” Hosea was particularly disturbed by the fact that Israel was breaking the terms of the covenant by worshipping other gods, such as Baal. Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned with the inner meaning of religion. As he makes Yahweh say: “What I want is love (hesed), not sacrifice; knowledge of God (daath Elohim), not holocausts.”²¹ He did not mean theological knowledge: the word daath comes from the Hebrew verb yada: to know, which has sexual connotations. Thus J says that Adam “knew” his wife, Eve.²² In the Old Canaanite religion, Baal had married the soil and the people had celebrated this with ritual orgies, but Hosea insisted that since the covenant, Yahweh had taken the place of Baal and had wedded the people of Israel. They had to understand that it was Yahweh, not Baal, who would bring fertility to the soil.²³ He was still wooing Israel like a lover, determined to lure her back from the Baals who had seduced her:

阿摩司抨击社会上的邪恶，而何西阿则着重指出以色列宗教缺乏内在性：“认识”上帝与“hesed”（慈爱）有关，意味着对耶和华的内在领悟和依恋必须凌驾于外在的遵守之上。

Where Amos attacked social wickedness, Hosea dwelt on the lack of inwardness in Israelite religion: the “knowledge” of God was related to “hesed,” implying an interior appropriation and attachment to Yahweh that must supersede exterior observance.

何西阿书让我们对先知们如何塑造他们对上帝的认知有了惊人的洞察。在他传道生涯的初期，耶和华似乎发出了一条令人震惊的命令。祂吩咐何西阿去娶一个妓女（esheth zeuunim），因为整个国家“都成了离弃耶和华的妓女”。 ²⁵然而，上帝似乎并没有命令何西阿去街头寻找妓女：esheth zeuunim（字面意思是“妓女的妻子”）指的是性情放荡的女人，或者是指生育崇拜中的圣妓。鉴于何西阿对生育仪式的关注，这似乎……他的妻子歌篾很可能已成为巴力崇拜中的一位圣职人员。因此，他的婚姻象征着耶和华与背信弃义的以色列之间的关系。何西阿和歌篾育有三个孩子，他们的名字都带有不祥的寓意。长子名叫耶斯列，取自著名的战场；女儿名叫罗路哈玛（意为“不被爱的”）；幼子名叫罗阿米（意为“非我子民”）。罗阿米出生时，耶和华就废除了与以色列的盟约：“你们不是我的子民，我不是你们的神。” ²⁶我们将看到，先知们常常受圣灵感动，表演精心设计的哑剧来展现他们百姓的困境，但何西阿的婚姻似乎并非从一开始就经过精心策划。经文清楚地表明，歌篾是在他们的孩子出生后才成为巴力崇拜中的圣职人员。何西阿事后才意识到，他的婚姻是受神的启示。失去妻子对何西阿来说是一次毁灭性的经历，这使他体会到耶和华的百姓离弃他、去追随巴力等神明时，他的感受。起初，何西阿很想与歌篾断绝关系，因为律法规定丈夫必须休妻。但何西阿仍然深爱着歌篾，最终他还是去找回了她，把她从新主人手中赎了回来。他认为自己想要赢回歌篾的愿望，正是耶和华愿意再给以色列一次机会的迹象。

Hosea gives us a startling insight into the way the prophets were developing their image of God. At the very beginning of his career, Yahweh seemed to have issued a shocking command. He told Hosea to go off and marry a whore (esheth zeuunim) because the whole country had “become nothing but a whore abandoning Yahweh.”²⁵ It appears, however, that God had not ordered Hosea to scour the streets for a prostitute: esheth zeuunim (literally, “a wife of prostitution”) meant either a woman with a promiscuous temperament or a sacred prostitute in a fertility cult. Given Hosea’s preoccupation with fertility rituals, it seems likely that his wife, Gomer, had become one of the sacred personnel in the cult of Baal. His marriage was, therefore, an emblem of Yahweh’s relationship with the faithless Israel. Hosea and Gomer had three children, who were given fateful, symbolic names. The elder son was called Jezreel, after a famous battlefield, their daughter was Lo-Ruhamah (Unloved) and their younger son Lo-Ammi (Not-My-People). At his birth, Yahweh had annulled the covenant with Israel: “You are not my people and I am not your God.”²⁶ We shall see that the prophets were often inspired to perform elaborate mimes to demonstrate the predicament of their people, but it appears that Hosea’s marriage was not coldly planned from the beginning. The text makes it clear that Gomer did not become an esheth zeuunim until after their children had been born. It was only with hindsight that it seemed to Hosea that his marriage had been inspired by God. The loss of his wife had been a shattering experience, which gave Hosea an insight into the way Yahweh must feel when his people deserted him and went whoring after deities like Baal. At first Hosea was tempted to denounce Gomer and have nothing more to do with her: indeed, the law stipulated that a man must divorce an unfaithful wife. But Hosea still loved Gomer, and eventually he went after her and bought her back from her new master. He saw his own desire to win Gomer back as a sign that Yahweh was willing to give Israel another chance.

当先知们将自身的人类情感和经历归于耶和华时，在某种重要意义上，他们是在按照自己的形象创造神。以赛亚，作为王室成员，将耶和华视为一位君王；阿摩司将自己对受苦穷人的同情归于耶和华；何西阿则将耶和华视为一位被抛弃的丈夫，他仍然对妻子怀有深切的思念。所有宗教都必须以某种拟人化的方式开始。一个与人类完全疏离的神，例如亚里士多德的“不动的推动者”，无法激发人们的灵性追求。只要这种投射不成为目的本身，它就能发挥作用，带来益处。必须指出的是，这种以人类视角对神进行想象性的描绘，激发了一种印度教所不具备的社会关怀。这三大宗教都与阿摩司和以赛亚的平等主义和社会主义伦理有着共通之处。犹太人是古代世界第一个建立起令异教邻居钦佩的福利制度的民族。

When they attributed their own human feelings and experiences to Yahweh, the prophets were in an important sense creating a god in their own image. Isaiah, a member of the royal family, had seen Yahweh as a king. Amos had ascribed his own empathy with the suffering poor to Yahweh; Hosea saw Yahweh as a jilted husband, who still continued to feel a yearning tenderness for his wife. All religion must begin with some anthropomorphism. A deity which is utterly remote from humanity, such as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, cannot inspire a spiritual quest. As long as this projection does not become an end in itself, it can be useful and beneficial. It has to be said that this imaginative portrayal of God in human terms has inspired a social concern that has not been present in Hinduism. All three of the God-religions have shared the egalitarian and socialist ethic of Amos and Isaiah. The Jews would be the first people in the ancient world to establish a welfare system that was the admiration of their pagan neighbors.

和其他先知一样，何西阿也深受偶像崇拜的恐怖所困扰。他预见到北方各支派会因崇拜他们自己所造的神而招致神的惩罚：

Like all the other prophets, Hosea was haunted by the horror of idolatry. He contemplated the divine vengeance that the northern tribes would bring upon themselves by worshipping gods that they had actually made themselves:

当然，这种描述对迦南宗教而言极不公平，也过于简化。迦南和巴比伦人从未相信他们所供奉的神像本身就是神；他们也从未真正跪拜过任何雕像。这些神像只是神性的象征。如同他们关于难以想象的原始事件的神话一样，神像的设计目的在于引导信徒的注意力超越其本身。埃萨吉拉神庙中的马尔杜克雕像和迦南的亚舍拉立石，从未被视为与神本身相同，而是作为一种焦点，帮助人们专注于人类生活中超越性的层面。然而，先知们却常常以一种极其不雅的蔑视来嘲笑他们异教邻居的神灵。在他们看来，这些自制的神灵不过是金银堆砌而成；它们是由工匠在几个小时内匆匆拼凑而成；它们的眼睛看不见，耳朵听不见；他们不能行走，只能由他们的信徒用手抬着走；他们是野蛮愚昧的次等人，如同瓜田里的稻草人。与以色列的上帝耶和华相比，他们是虚无的。敬拜他们的外邦人是愚昧的，耶和华憎恶他们^。28

This was, of course, a most unfair and reductive description of Canaanite religion. The people of Canaan and Babylon had never believed that their effigies of the gods were themselves divine; they had never bowed down to worship a statue tout court. The effigy had been a symbol of divinity. Like their myths about the unimaginable primordial events, it had been devised to direct the attention of the worshipper beyond itself. The statue of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila and the standing stones of Asherah in Canaan had never been seen as identical with the gods but had been a focus that had helped people to concentrate on the transcendent element of human life. Yet the prophets frequently jeered at the deities of their pagan neighbors with a most unattractive contempt. These homemade gods, in their view, were nothing but gold and silver; they had been knocked together by a craftsman in a couple of hours; they had eyes that did not see, ears that did not hear; they could not walk and had to be carted about by their worshippers; they were brutish and stupid subhuman beings that were no better than scarecrows in a melon patch. Compared with Yahweh, the Elohim of Israel, they were elilim, Nothings. The goyim who worshipped them were fools and Yahweh hated them.²⁸

如今，我们对一神教不幸带有的不宽容习以为常，以至于可能难以理解，这种对其他神祇的敌意其实是一种新的宗教态度。异教本质上是一种宽容的信仰：只要新神祇的出现不威胁到旧有的崇拜，传统神系中就总能容纳其他神祇。即使在轴心时代的新意识形态取代了对神祇的旧有崇拜，也没有出现对古代神祇如此恶毒的排斥。我们看到，在印度教和佛教中，人们被鼓励超越神祇，而不是憎恶地否定它们。然而，以色列的先知们却无法以这种更为平和的视角看待他们眼中与耶和华为敌的神祇。在犹太教经典中，“偶像崇拜”——即崇拜“假神”——这种新的罪恶令人作呕。这种反应或许类似于某些教父对性行为的厌恶。因此，它并非理性、深思熟虑之举。这种反应虽然表面上看似平静，实则表达了内心深处的焦虑和压抑。先知们是否对自己宗教行为怀有某种难以言说的担忧？他们是否不安地意识到，自己对耶和华的理解与异教徒的偶像崇拜并无二致，因为他们也在按照自己的形象创造神明？

Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon. Even where the new ideologies of the Axial Age were replacing the old veneration of the gods, there was no such vitriolic rejection of the ancient deities. We have seen that in Hinduism and Buddhism people were encouraged to go beyond the gods rather than to turn upon them with loathing. Yet the prophets of Israel were unable to take this calmer view of the deities they saw as Yahweh’s rivals. In the Jewish scriptures, the new sin of “idolatry,” the worship of “false” gods, inspires something akin to nausea. It is a reaction that is, perhaps, similar to the revulsion that some of the Fathers of the Church would feel for sexuality. As such, it is not a rational, considered reaction but expressive of deep anxiety and repression. Were the prophets harboring a buried worry about their own religious behavior? Were they, perhaps, uneasily aware that their own conception of Yahweh was similar to the idolatry of the pagans, since they too were creating a god in their own image?

与基督教对性的态度进行比较，从另一个角度也颇具启发意义。当时，大多数以色列人默认地相信异教神祇的存在。诚然，在某些群体中，耶和华逐渐接管了迦南神祇（elohim）的部分职能：例如，何西阿就试图论证自己比巴力更胜一筹，是一位更优秀的生育之神。但对于无可救药的男性化的耶和华而言，要取代亚舍拉、伊什塔尔或阿纳特等女神的职能显然是困难的，因为这些女神在以色列人中，尤其是在女性群体中，仍然拥有众多信徒。尽管一神论者坚持认为他们的神超越性别，但他本质上仍然是男性，尽管我们会看到，有些人试图弥补这种性别上的不平衡。部分原因在于他起源于部落战争之神。然而，他与女神们的斗争反映了轴心时代一个不太积极的特征，即女性地位的普遍下降。似乎在较为原始的社会中，女性有时比男性更受尊重。传统宗教中伟大女神的威望反映了对女性的崇敬。然而，随着城市的兴起，男性特质，如武力、体魄，被推崇得凌驾于女性特质之上。从此，女性在新文明中被边缘化，沦为二等公民。例如，她们在希腊的地位尤其低下——西方人在谴责东方父权制观念时，应该牢记这一点。民主理想并未惠及雅典的女性，她们隐居于世，被视为低人一等的存在。以色列社会也逐渐呈现出男性化的倾向。在早期，女性强势有力，并明确地将自己视为与丈夫平等的存在。一些女性，例如底波拉，甚至曾率领军队征战沙场。以色列人会继续颂扬像犹滴和以斯帖这样的女英雄，但耶和华成功击败迦南和中东的其他神祇，成为独一真神之后，他的宗教几乎完全由男性掌管。女神崇拜将被取代，这标志着新文明世界特有的文化变迁。

The comparison with the Christian attitude toward sexuality is illuminating in another way. At this point, most Israelites believed implicitly in the existence of the pagan deities. It is true that Yahweh was gradually taking over some of the functions of the elohim of the Canaanites in certain circles: Hosea, for example, was trying to argue that he was a better fertility god than Baal. But it was obviously difficult for the irredeemably masculine Yahweh to usurp the function of a goddess like Asherah, Ishtar or Anat, who still had a great following among the Israelites, particularly among the women. Even though monotheists would insist that their God transcended gender, he would remain essentially male, though we shall see that some would try to remedy this imbalance. In part, this was due to his origins as a tribal god of war. Yet his battle with the goddesses reflects a less positive characteristic of the Axial Age, which generally saw a decline in the status of women and the female. It seems that in more primitive societies, women were sometimes held in higher esteem than men. The prestige of the great goddesses in traditional religion reflects the veneration of the female. The rise of the cities, however, meant that the more masculine qualities of martial, physical strength were exalted over female characteristics. Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position was particularly poor in Greece, for example—a fact that Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchal attitudes of the Orient. The democratic ideal did not extend to the women of Athens, who lived in seclusion and were despised as inferior beings. Israelite society was also becoming more masculine in tone. In the early days, women were forceful and clearly saw themselves as the equals of their husbands. Some, like Deborah, had led armies into battle. Israelites would continue to celebrate such heroic women as Judith and Esther, but after Yahweh had successfully vanquished the other gods and goddesses of Canaan and the Middle East and become the only God, his religion would be managed almost entirely by men. The cult of the goddesses would be superseded, and this would be a symptom of a cultural change that was characteristic of the newly civilized world.

我们将看到，耶和华的胜利来之不易。它充满了紧张、暴力和对抗，这表明，那一位的新宗教……上帝不像佛教或印度教那样轻易地降临到次大陆人民面前。耶和华似乎无法以和平自然的方式超越那些古老的神祇。他必须通过斗争来赢得地位。因此，在诗篇82篇中，我们看到他试图夺取神圣议会的领导权，而神圣议会在巴比伦和迦南神话中都扮演着至关重要的角色：

We shall see that Yahweh’s victory was hard-won. It involved strain, violence and confrontation and suggests that the new religion of the One God was not coming as easily to the Israelites as Buddhism or Hinduism to the people of the subcontinent. Yahweh did not seem able to transcend the older deities in a peaceful, natural manner. He had to fight it out. Thus in Psalm 82 we see him making a play for the leadership of the Divine Assembly, which had played such an important role in both Babylonian and Canaanite myth:

当耶和华站出来质问自古以来由埃尔主持的议会时，他指责其他神明未能应对当时的社会挑战。他代表了先知们所秉持的现代仁慈精神，但他的神明同僚们多年来却在促进正义和公平方面毫无作为。在远古时期，耶和华曾准备接纳他们为“神子”（elohim） ，^即至高神埃尔（El Elyon）的儿子们，但如今这些神明已经证明他们已经过时。他们终将像凡人一样消亡。诗篇作者不仅描绘了耶和华判处其他神明死刑的场景，而且这样做也篡夺了埃尔的传统特权——埃尔似乎在以色列仍然拥有拥护者。

When he stood up to confront the Council over which El has presided from time immemorial, Yahweh accused the other gods of failing to meet the social challenge of the day. He represented the modern compassionate ethos of the prophets, but his divine colleagues had done nothing to promote justice and equity over the years. In the old days, Yahweh had been prepared to accept them as elohim, the sons of El Elyon (“God Most High”),³⁰ but now the gods had proved that they were obsolete. They would wither away like mortal men. Not only did the psalmist depict Yahweh condemning his fellow gods to death, but in doing so he had usurped the traditional prerogative of El, who, it would seem, still had his champions in Israel.

尽管《圣经》对偶像崇拜有所谴责，但偶像崇拜本身并无不妥：只有当人们将精心塑造的上帝形象与它所指涉的不可言喻的实在混淆时，它才会变得令人反感或幼稚。我们将看到，在上帝历史的后期，一些犹太人、基督徒和穆斯林都曾参与过对这一早期形象的塑造。有些人试图探究绝对实在，最终形成了一种更接近印度教或佛教的观念。然而，另一些人却始终未能做到这一点，而是想当然地认为他们对神的理解与终极奥秘完全一致。公元前622年左右，犹大王约西亚统治时期，“偶像崇拜”宗教的危险性显露无疑。他急于扭转其前任玛拿西王（公元前687-642年）和亚们王（公元前642-640年）的宗教融合政策，这两位王曾鼓励百姓在敬拜耶和华的同时敬拜迦南诸神。玛拿西甚至在圣殿中竖立了亚舍拉的雕像，当时那里盛行着丰饶的生育崇拜。由于大多数以色列人都信奉亚舍拉，有些人甚至认为她是耶和华的妻子，因此只有最虔诚的耶和华信徒才会认为这是亵渎神明的行为。然而，约西亚决心弘扬耶和华的崇拜，于是决定对圣殿进行大规模修缮。据说，当工人们翻动圣殿时，大祭司希勒家发现了一份古老的手稿，据称是摩西向以色列人所作的最后一次布道的记录。他将手稿交给约西亚的秘书沙番，沙番当着国王的面朗读了这份手稿。年轻的国王听后，惊恐万分，撕裂衣服：难怪耶和华如此愤怒于他的祖先！他们完全没有遵守耶和华对摩西的严厉指示^。

Despite the bad press it has in the Bible, there is nothing wrong with idolatry per se: it becomes objectionable or naive only if the image of God, which has been constructed with such loving care, is confused with the ineffable reality to which it refers. We shall see that later in the history of God, some Jews, Christians and Muslims worked on this early image of the absolute reality and arrived at a conception that was closer to the Hindu or Buddhist visions. Others, however, never quite managed to take this step, but assumed that their conception of God was identical with the ultimate mystery. The dangers of an “idolatrous” religiosity became clear in about 622 BCE during the reign of King Josiah of Judah. He was anxious to reverse the syncretist policies of his predecessors, King Manasseh (687–42) and King Amon (642–40), who had encouraged their people to worship the gods of Canaan alongside Yahweh. Manasseh had actually put up an effigy to Asherah in the Temple, where there was a flourishing fertility cult. Since most Israelites were devoted to Asherah and some thought that she was Yahweh’s wife, only the strictest Yahwists would have considered this blasphemous. Determined to promote the cult of Yahweh, however, Josiah had decided to make extensive repairs in the Temple. While the workmen were turning everything upside down, the High Priest Hilkiah is said to have discovered an ancient manuscript which purported to be an account of Moses’ last sermon to the children of Israel. He gave it to Josiah’s secretary, Shapan, who read it aloud in the king’s presence. When he heard it, the young king tore his garments in horror: no wonder Yahweh had been so angry with his ancestors! They had totally failed to obey his strict instructions to Moses.³¹

几乎可以肯定，希勒家发现的“律法书”就是我们今天所知的《申命记》的核心部分。关于改革派为何如此及时地“发现”它，众说纷纭。甚至有人认为，它是希勒家和沙番在女先知户勒大的协助下秘密撰写的，约西亚王随即向户勒大请教。我们永远无法确切得知真相，但这本书无疑反映了以色列一种全新的坚定立场，体现了七世纪的时代视角。在摩西的最后一次布道中，他强调了圣约以及以色列蒙神拣选这一理念的核心地位。耶和华拣选他的子民，并非因为他们自身有任何功德，而是出于他深沉的爱。作为回报，他要求他们完全忠诚，并坚决摒弃一切其他神明。《申命记》的核心内容包含了一段后来成为犹太教信仰宣言的经文：

It is almost certain that the “Book of the Law” discovered by Hilkiah was the core of the text that we now know as Deuteronomy. There have been various theories about its timely “discovery” by the reforming party. Some have even suggested that it had been secretly written by Hilkiah and Shapan themselves with the assistance of the prophetess Huldah, whom Josiah immediately consulted. We shall never know for certain, but the book certainly reflected an entirely new intransigence in Israel, which reflects a seventh-century perspective. In his last sermon, Moses is made to give a new centrality to the covenant and the idea of the special election of Israel. Yahweh had marked his people out from all the other nations, not because of any merit of their own but because of his great love. In return, he demanded complete loyalty and a fierce rejection of all other gods. The core of Deuteronomy includes the declaration which would later become the Jewish profession of faith:

上帝的拣选使以色列人与外邦人（goyim）分别出来，因此，作者借摩西之口说道，当他们到达应许之地时，他们不可与当地居民有任何往来。他们“不可与他们立约，也不可怜悯他们”。 ³³不可通婚，也不可混杂。最重要的是，他们要彻底铲除迦南人的宗教：“拆毁他们的祭坛，打碎他们的立石，砍下他们的柱像，焚烧他们的偶像，”摩西命令以色列人，“因为你们是归耶和华你们神为圣的子民；耶和华我们的神从地上的万民中拣选你们，特作自己的子民。” ³⁴

The election of God had set Israel apart from the goyim, so, the author makes Moses say, when they arrived in the Promised Land they were to have no dealings whatever with the native inhabitants. They “must make no covenant with them or show them any pity.”³³ There must be no intermarriage and no social mixing. Above all, they were to wipe out the Canaanite religion: “Tear down their altars, smash their standing stones, cut down their sacred poles and set fire to their idols,” Moses commands the Israelites, “For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh your Elohim; it is you that Yahweh our Elohim has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples in the earth.”³⁴

今天，犹太人诵读《示玛篇​​》时，赋予其一神论的解释：耶和华我们的神是独一的。申命记的作者当时尚未达到这种观点。“耶和华是独一的”并非指神是独一的，而是指耶和华是唯一被允许敬拜的神。其他神仍然是威胁：它们的崇拜具有吸引力，会引诱以色列人背离耶和华——一位忌邪的神。如果他们遵守耶和华的律法，他就会祝福他们，赐予他们繁荣；但如果他们背弃他，后果将是毁灭性的。

When they recite the Shema today, Jews give it a monotheistic interpretation: Yahweh our God is One and unique. The Deuteronomist had not yet reached this perspective. “Yahweh ehad” did not mean God is One, but that Yahweh was the only deity whom it was permitted to worship. Other gods were still a threat: their cults were attractive and could lure Israelites from Yahweh, who was a jealous God. If they obeyed Yahweh’s laws, he would bless them and bring them prosperity, but if they deserted him the consequences would be devastating:

公元前七世纪末，约西亚王和他的臣民听到这些话时，他们即将面临新的政治威胁。他们成功地抵御了亚述人的入侵，从而避免了像北方十个支派那样遭受摩西所描述的惩罚。然而，公元前606年，巴比伦王尼布帕拉萨尔击败了亚述人，并开始建立自己的帝国。

When King Josiah and his subjects heard these words at the end of the seventh century, they were about to be confronted by a new political threat. They had managed to keep the Assyrians at bay and had thus avoided the fate of the ten northern tribes, who had endured the punishments described by Moses. But in 606 BCE, the Babylonian King Nebupolassar would crush the Assyrians and begin to build his own empire.

在当时极度动荡不安的局势下，《申命记》作者的政策产生了巨大的影响。以色列的最后两位君王非但没有遵守耶和华的命令，反而蓄意招致灾祸。约西亚王立即开始改革，其行动展现出令人敬佩的热忱。圣殿中所有的雕像、偶像和生育象征都被取出并焚毁。约西亚王还拆毁了……亚舍拉的大型雕像被毁，为她织布的圣殿妓女的住所也被摧毁。全国所有曾是异教据点的古老圣地都被夷为平地。从此以后，祭司们只被允许在洁净的耶路撒冷圣殿中向耶和华献祭。近300年后，记录约西亚改革的史学家对这种既否定又压制的虔诚进行了生动的描述：

In this climate of extreme insecurity, the Deuteronomist’s policies made a great impact. Far from obeying Yahweh’s commands, the last two kings of Israel had deliberately courted disaster. Josiah instantly began a reform, acting with exemplary zeal. All the images, idols and fertility symbols were taken out of the Temple and burned. Josiah also pulled down the large effigy of Asherah and destroyed the apartments of the Temple prostitutes, who wove garments for her there. All the ancient shrines in the country, which had been enclaves of paganism, were destroyed. Henceforth the priests were only allowed to offer sacrifice to Yahweh in the purified Jerusalem Temple. The chronicler, who recorded Josiah’s reforms nearly 300 years later, gives an eloquent description of this piety of denial and suppression:

我们与佛陀那种平静地接纳他认为自己已经超越的诸神的状态相去甚远。这种大规模的破坏源于一种根植于深埋于心的焦虑和恐惧中的仇恨。

We are far from the Buddha’s serene acceptance of the deities he believed he had outgrown. This wholesale destruction springs from a hatred that is rooted in buried anxiety and fear.

改革者们改写了以色列的历史。《约书亚记》、《士师记》、《撒母耳记》和《列王纪》等历史书卷根据新的意识形态进行了修订。后来，《摩西五经》的编纂者在原有的《约书亚记》和《撒母耳记》叙述中加入了申命记式的出埃及神话解读。耶和华如今成了迦南圣战的始作俑者。以色列人被告知，迦南本地人不得居住在他们的土地上，³⁷约书亚被迫以不择手段的方式执行这项政策：

The reformers rewrote Israelite history. The historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were revised according to the new ideology and, later, the editors of the Pentateuch added passages that gave a Deuteronomist interpretation of the Exodus myth to the older narratives of J and E. Yahweh was now the author of a holy war of extermination in Canaan. The Israelites are told that the native Canaanites must not live in their country,³⁷ a policy which Joshua is made to implement with unholy thoroughness:

事实上，我们对约书亚和士师征服迦南的历史一无所知，尽管毫无疑问，那段时期流血牺牲。然而，如今，这场流血事件却被赋予了宗教理由。这种做法的危险性在于……那些缺乏以赛亚式超越视角的拣选神学，在圣战中显露无疑，而圣战正是这一神学在基督教一神论历史上留下的伤痕。这种拣选神学非但没有将上帝塑造成挑战我们偏见、促使我们反思自身缺陷的象征，反而可能被用来强化我们自私的仇恨，并将其奉为圭臬。它使上帝的行为与我们如出一辙，仿佛他只是一个普通人。这样的上帝或许比阿摩司和以赛亚笔下那位要求信徒进行无情自我批判的上帝更具吸引力，也更受人拥戴。

In fact we know nothing about the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the Judges, though doubtless a good deal of blood was shed. Now, however, the bloodshed had been given a religious rationale. The dangers of such theologies of election, which are not qualified by the transcendent perspective of an Isaiah, are clearly shown in the holy wars that have scarred the history of monotheism. Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism.

犹太人常常因自称是上帝的选民而受到批评，但批评者往往犯了与圣经时代反对偶像崇拜的那种否认错误同样的错误。三大一神教在历史上的不同时期都发展出了类似的拣选神学，有时其后果甚至比《约书亚记》中所描述的还要严重。西方基督徒尤其容易受到“自己是上帝的选民”这种自以为是的观念的影响。在十一、十二世纪，十字军东征者以“新的选民”自居，声称他们继承了犹太人失去的使命，以此为针对犹太人和穆斯林的圣战辩护。加尔文主义的拣选神学在很大程度上促使美国人相信他们是上帝的子民。正如约西亚统治下的犹大王国一样，这种信念在政治动荡、人们恐惧自身毁灭的时期很容易盛行。或许正因如此，它在当今犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教中盛行的各种原教旨主义形式中获得了新的生命力。像耶和华这样人格化的神可以被操纵，以此来支撑饱受困扰的自我，而像梵天这样非人格化的神则无法做到这一点。

The Jews have often been criticized for their belief that they are the Chosen People, but their critics have often been guilty of the same kind of denial that fueled the diatribes against idolatry in biblical times. All three of the monotheistic faiths have developed similar theologies of election at different times in their history, sometimes with even more devastating results than those imagined in the Book of Joshua. Western Christians have been particularly prone to the flattering belief that they are God’s elect. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Crusaders justified their holy wars against Jews and Muslims by calling themselves the new Chosen People, who had taken up the vocation that the Jews had lost. Calvinist theologies of election have been largely instrumental in encouraging Americans to believe that they are God’s own nation. As in Josiah’s Kingdom of Judah, such a belief is likely to flourish at a time of political insecurity when people are haunted by the fear of their own destruction. It is for this reason, perhaps, that it has gained a new lease of life in the various forms of fundamentalism that are rife among Jews, Christians and Muslims at this writing. A personal God like Yahweh can be manipulated to shore up the beleaguered self in this way, as an impersonal deity like Brahman can not.

值得注意的是，在公元前587年尼布甲尼撒摧毁耶路撒冷并将犹太人掳往巴比伦之前的几年里，并非所有以色列人都信奉申命记。公元前604年，即尼布甲尼撒登基之年，先知耶利米复兴了以赛亚的破除偶像的观点，彻底颠覆了选民凯旋式的教义：上帝利用巴比伦惩罚以色列，如今轮到以色列“受禁”了。^他们将流亡七十年。约雅敬王听到这预言后，从文士手中夺过书卷，将其撕碎，扔进火里。耶利米因担心性命，被迫隐居。

We should note that not all the Israelites subscribed to Deuteronomism in the years that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon. In 604, the year of Nebuchadnezzar’s accession, the prophet Jeremiah revived the iconoclastic perspective of Isaiah which turned the triumphalist doctrine of the Chosen People on its head: God was using Babylon as his instrument to punish Israel, and it was now Israel’s turn to be “put under a ban.”³⁹ They would go into exile for seventy years. When King Jehoiakim heard this oracle, he snatched the scroll from the hands of the scribe, cut it in pieces and threw it on the fire. Fearing for his life, Jeremiah was forced to go into hiding.

耶利米的经历展现了塑造这一更具挑战性的上帝形象所付出的巨大痛苦和努力。他憎恨自己作为先知的身份。他不得不谴责自己所爱的人，这令他深感痛苦。40他并非天生的激进分子^，而是一个心地善良的人。当呼召临到他时，他抗议地喊道：“啊，主耶和华！看哪，我不会说话，我还是个孩子！”耶和华“伸手”按在他的嘴唇上，将祂的话语放在他的口中。他必须传达的信息是含糊不清且自相矛盾的：“拆毁、推倒、毁坏、倾覆，建造、栽植。” ⁴¹这要求他在不可调和的极端之间承受痛苦的张力。耶利米体验到的上帝是一种痛苦，这种痛苦使他的四肢痉挛，使他的心碎，使他像醉汉一样摇摇晃晃。42 这种^既可怕又迷人的奥秘的先知体验，同时既是强奸又是诱惑：

Jeremiah’s career shows the immense pain and effort involved in the forging of this more challenging image of God. He hated being a prophet and was profoundly distressed to have to condemn the people he loved.⁴⁰ He was not a natural firebrand but a tenderhearted man. When the call had come to him, he cried out in protest: “Ah, Lord Yahweh; look, I do not know how to speak: I am a child!” and Yahweh had “put out his hand” and touched his lips, putting his words on his mouth. The message that he had to articulate was ambiguous and contradictory: “to tear up and to knock down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”⁴¹ It demanded an agonizing tension between irreconcilable extremes. Jeremiah experienced God as a pain that convulsed his limbs, broke his heart and made him stagger about like a drunk.⁴² The prophetic experience of the mysterium terribile et fascinans was at one and the same time rape and seduction:

上帝将耶利米引向两个不同的方向：一方面，他感到对耶和华有一种深深的吸引力，就像被诱惑一样甜蜜地臣服；但另一方面，他又感到被一股力量所蹂躏，违背他的意愿地带着他前行。

God was pulling Jeremiah in two different directions: on the one hand, he felt a profound attraction toward Yahweh that had all the sweet surrender of a seduction, but at other times he felt ravaged by a force that carried him along against his will.

自阿摩司以来，先知们一直都是独行的。与当时的奥伊库梅内其他地区不同，中东并没有形成广泛统一的宗教意识形态。44^先知的上帝迫使以色列人与中东的神话意识决裂，走上一条与主流截然不同的道路。从耶利米的痛苦经历中，我们可以看到这其中蕴含着多么巨大的痛苦和混乱。以色列是耶和华信仰的一个小小的飞地，周围环绕着异教世界，而耶和华甚至被许多以色列人所拒绝。即使是申命记的作者，尽管他对上帝的描述不那么具有威胁性，也认为与耶和华的相遇是一场激烈的对抗：他让摩西向那些对直接接触耶和华感到恐惧的以色列人解释，上帝会在每一代都派遣一位先知来承受神圣力量的冲击。

Ever since Amos, the prophet had been a man on his own. Unlike the other areas of the Oikumene at this time, the Middle East did not adopt a broadly united religious ideology.⁴⁴ The God of the prophets was forcing Israelites to sever themselves from the mythical consciousness of the Middle East and go in quite a different direction from the mainstream. In the agony of Jeremiah, we can see what an immense wrench and dislocation this involved. Israel was a tiny enclave of Yahwism surrounded by a pagan world, and Yahweh was also rejected by many of the Israelites themselves. Even the Deuteronomist, whose image of God was less threatening, saw a meeting with Yahweh as an abrasive confrontation: he makes Moses explain to the Israelites, who are appalled by the prospect of unmediated contact with Yahweh, that God will send them a prophet in each generation to bear the brunt of the divine impact.

当时还没有任何东西可以与阿特曼（内在的神性）相提并论。在对耶和华的崇拜中，这一原则至关重要。耶和华被视为一种外在的、超越现实的存在。为了使他显得不那么遥远，人们需要以某种方式赋予他人性。政治局势日益恶化：巴比伦人入侵犹大，掳走了国王和第一批以色列人；最终，耶路撒冷城本身也被围困。随着局势的恶化，耶利米延续了将人类情感赋予耶和华的传统：他让上帝哀叹自己的无家可归、苦难和荒凉；耶和华感到与他的子民一样震惊、愤怒和被遗弃；他似乎也像他们一样困惑、疏离和麻木。耶利米心中涌起的愤怒并非他自己的，而是耶和华的愤怒。45^当先知们想到“人”时，他们自然而然地也会想到“神”，因为神在世上的存在似乎与他的子民密不可分。事实上，当上帝想要在世间行事时，祂依赖于人——这一观念在犹太教的神性观中变得至关重要。甚至有迹象表明，人类能够从自身的情感和经历中感知到上帝的作为，耶和华是人类境况的一部分。

There was as yet nothing to compare with Atman, the immanent divine principle, in the cult of Yahweh. Yahweh was experienced as an external, transcendent reality. He needed to be humanized in some way to make him appear less alien. The political situation was deteriorating: the Babylonians invaded Judah and carried the king and the first batch of Israelites off into exile; finally Jerusalem itself was besieged. As conditions got worse, Jeremiah continued the tradition of ascribing human emotions to Yahweh: he makes God lament his own homelessness, affliction and desolation; Yahweh felt as stunned, offended and abandoned as his people; like them he seemed bemused, alienated and paralyzed. The anger that Jeremiah felt welling up in his own heart was not his own but the wrath of Yahweh.⁴⁵ When the prophets thought about “man,” they automatically also thought “God,” whose presence in the world seems inextricably bound up with his people. Indeed, God is dependent upon man when he wants to act in the world—an idea that would become very important in the Jewish conception of the divine. There are even hints that human beings can discern the activity of God in their own emotions and experiences, that Yahweh is part of the human condition.

只要敌人还在城门口，耶利米就奉神的名斥责他的百姓（尽管在神面前，他也为他们求情）。公元前587年耶路撒冷被巴比伦人攻陷后，耶和华的启示变得更加令人安慰：他应许拯救他的百姓，因为他们已经吸取了教训，并将他们带回家。巴比伦当局允许耶利米留在犹大，为了表达他对未来的信心，他购买了一些土地：“万军之耶和华如此说：‘人必再在这地买田地和葡萄园。’” ⁴⁶不出所料，有些人将这场灾难归咎于耶和华。耶利米在访问埃及期间，遇到一群逃往尼罗河三角洲地区的犹太人，他们对耶和华毫无敬畏之心。她们的妇女声称，只要她们按照传统仪式祭祀天后伊什塔尔，一切都安然无恙；但一旦她们在耶利米之流的唆使下停止这些仪式，灾难、失败和贫困便接踵而至。然而，这场悲剧似乎加深了耶利米自身的领悟。47^耶路撒冷陷落、圣殿被毁之后，他开始意识到，这些外在的宗教形式仅仅是内在主观状态的象征。将来，与以色列的盟约将截然不同：“我要将我的律法栽种在他们里面，写在他们心上。” ⁴⁸

As long as the enemy stood at the gate, Jeremiah raged at his people in God’s name (though, before God, he pleaded on their behalf). Once Jerusalem had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587, the oracles from Yahweh became more comforting: he promised to save his people, now that they had learned their lesson, and bring them home. Jeremiah had been allowed by the Babylonian authorities to stay behind in Judah, and to express his confidence in the future, he bought some real estate: “For Yahweh Sabaoth says this: ‘People will buy fields and vineyards in this land again.’ ”⁴⁶ Not surprisingly, some people blamed Yahweh for the catastrophe. During a visit to Egypt, Jeremiah encountered a group of Jews who had fled to the Delta area and had no time at all for Yahweh. Their women claimed that everything had been fine as long as they had performed the traditional rites in honor of Ishtar, Queen of Heaven, but as soon as they stopped them, at the behest of the likes of Jeremiah, disaster, defeat and penury had followed. Yet the tragedy seemed to deepen Jeremiah’s own insight.⁴⁷ After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, he began to realize that such external trappings of religion were simply symbols of an internal, subjective state. In the future, the covenant with Israel would be quite different: “Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it in their hearts.”⁴⁸

那些被流放的人并没有像公元前722年北方的十个部落那样被迫同化。他们居住在两个社区：一个在巴比伦城内，另一个在一条从……通往……的运河岸边。幼发拉底河在尼普尔和吾珥附近被称为基巴河，那里被他们称为特拉维夫（意为“春天之山”）。公元597年第一批被驱逐的犹太人中，有一位名叫以西结的祭司。他独自在家待了大约五年，没有与任何人交谈。后来，他看到了耶和华的异象，这异象震撼了他的心灵，使他昏厥过去。详细描述他的第一次异象非常重要，因为几个世纪后，它将对犹太神秘主义者产生深远的影响，我们将在第七章中看到这一点。以西结看到一团光芒，其中闪电交加。一股强风从北方吹来。在这风暴肆虐的黑暗中，他似乎看到——他特意强调了这种景象的暂时性——一辆由四头强壮的牲畜拉着的大战车。它们与巴比伦宫门上雕刻的卡里布（Karibu）相似，但以西结的描述却几乎让人难以想象：每个卡里布都有四个头：分别是人脸、狮脸、牛脸和鹰脸。每个车轮的滚动方向都与其他车轮不同。这种形象的描绘恰恰强调了以西结努力想要表达的异象所带来的震撼。这些生物拍打翅膀的声音震耳欲聋；“如同奔流的水声，如同全能者的声音，如同暴风雨的声音，如同营地的喧嚣。”战车上有一个“如同”宝座的东西，端坐着一个“看起来像人的”身影：它像铜一样闪耀，四肢喷火。它也“像耶和华的荣耀（ kavod ）”。 ⁴⁹ 以西结立刻俯伏在地，听见一个声音在对他说话。

Those who had gone into exile were not forced to assimilate, as the ten northern tribes had been in 722. They lived in two communities: one in Babylon itself and the other on the banks of a canal leading from the Euphrates called the Chebar, not far from Nippur and Ur, in an area which they named Tel Aviv (Springtime Hill). Among the first batch of exiles to be deported in 597 had been a priest called Ezekiel. For about five years he stayed alone in his house and did not speak to a soul. Then he had a shattering vision of Yahweh, which literally knocked him out. It is important to describe his first vision in some detail because—centuries later—it would become very important to Jewish mystics, as we shall see in Chapter 7. Ezekiel had seen a cloud of light, shot through with lightning. A strong wind blew from the north. In the midst of this stormy obscurity, he seemed to see—he is careful to emphasize the provisional nature of the imagery—a great chariot pulled by four strong beasts. They were similar to the karibu carved on the palace gates in Babylon, yet Ezekiel makes it almost impossible to visualize them: each one had four heads: with the face of a man, a lion, a bull and an eagle. Each one of the wheels rolled in a different direction from the others. The imagery simply served to emphasize the alien impact of the visions that he was struggling to articulate. The beating of the creatures’ wings was deafening; it “sounded like rushing water, like the voice of Shaddai, a voice like a storm, like the noise of a camp.” On the chariot there was something that was “like” a throne and, sitting in state, was a “being that looked like a man”: it shone like brass, fire shooting from its limbs. It was also “something that looked like the glory (kavod) of Yahweh.”⁴⁹ At once Ezekiel fell upon his face and heard a voice addressing him.

那声音称以西结为“人子”，仿佛要强调人与神圣领域之间如今存在的鸿沟。然而，耶和华的异象之后，必有切实可行的行动计划。以西结要将神的话语传达给悖逆的以色列子民。神圣信息的非人性特质，通过一个震撼人心的意象得以展现：一只手伸向先知，紧握着一卷书卷，上面写满了哀号和呻吟。以西结奉命吃下这卷书卷，将神的话语吞入腹中，使其成为自身的一部分。如同往常一样，这奥秘既令人着迷又令人恐惧：书卷尝起来却像蜂蜜一样甜美。最后，以西结说：“圣灵托起我，带我走；我心中充满苦毒和愤怒，耶和华的手重重地压在我身上。” ⁵⁰ 他抵达特拉维夫，整整一周“如同惊恐万分”地躺着。

The voice called Ezekiel “son of man,” as if to emphasize the distance that now existed between humanity and the divine realm. Yet again, the vision of Yahweh was to be followed by a practical plan of action. Ezekiel was to speak the word of God to the rebellious sons of Israel. The nonhuman quality of the divine message was conveyed by a violent image: a hand stretched toward the prophet clasping a scroll, covered with Wailings and moanings. Ezekiel was commanded to eat the scroll, to ingest the Word of God and make it part of himself. As usual, the mysterium was fascinans as well as terribile: the scroll turned out to taste as sweet as honey. Finally, Ezekiel said, “the spirit lifted me and took me; my heart, as I went, overflowed with bitterness and anger, and the hand of Yahweh lay heavy on me.”⁵⁰ He arrived at Tel Aviv and lay “like one stunned” for a whole week.

以西结的奇异经历凸显了神圣世界对人类而言是多么陌生和疏离。他本人也被迫成为这种疏离感的象征。耶和华经常命令他表演怪异的哑剧，这使他与常人截然不同。这些哑剧也是精心设计的。为了展现以色列在这场危机中的困境，更深层次地揭示以色列自身在异教世界中的局外人地位。例如，当以西结的妻子去世时，他被禁止哀悼；他必须侧卧390天，再侧卧40天；有一次，他被迫收拾行囊，像难民一样在特拉维夫四处游荡，没有固定的居所。耶和华使他极度焦虑，以至于他无法停止颤抖和焦躁不安地走动。还有一次，他被迫吃粪便，以此象征他的同胞在耶路撒冷被围困期间将要遭受的饥荒。以西结成为了耶和华崇拜所带来的彻底断裂的象征：一切都不能被视为理所当然，正常的反应也被否定。

Ezekiel’s strange career emphasizes how alien and foreign the divine world had become to humanity. He himself was forced to become a sign of this strangeness. Yahweh frequently commanded him to perform weird mimes, which set him apart from normal beings. They were also designed to demonstrate the plight of Israel during this crisis and, at a deeper level, showed that Israel was itself becoming an outsider in the pagan world. Thus, when his wife died, Ezekiel was forbidden to mourn; he had to lie on one side for 390 days and on the other for 40; once he had to pack his bags and walk around Tel Aviv like a refugee, with no abiding city. Yahweh afflicted him with such acute anxiety that he could not stop trembling and moving about restlessly. On another occasion, he was forced to eat excrement, as a sign of the starvation that his countrymen would have to endure during the siege of Jerusalem. Ezekiel had become an icon of the radical discontinuity that the cult of Yahweh involved: nothing could be taken for granted, and normal responses were denied.

另一方面，异教的观念颂扬神灵与自然界之间存在的连续性。以西结对这种古老的宗教毫无慰藉，他习惯性地称之为“污秽”。在一次异象中，他被引领参观了耶路撒冷的圣殿。令他震惊的是，他看到，犹大百姓即便身处毁灭的边缘，仍在耶和华的圣殿中敬拜异教神灵。圣殿本身已沦为噩梦般的场所：房间的墙壁上绘满了扭动的蛇和令人作呕的动物；祭司们举行“污秽”的仪式，被描绘得极其肮脏，仿佛他们在密室里进行着某种淫乱的行为：“人子啊，你看见以色列宝座的长老们在黑暗中，在他们各自彩绘的房间里所行的事吗？” ⁵¹在另一个房间里，妇女们为受苦的神塔穆兹哭泣。其他人则背对着圣所，敬拜太阳。最后，先知目睹了他在第一个异象中看到的那辆奇异战车飞走，带走了耶和华的“荣耀”。然而，耶和华并非完全遥不可及的神。在耶路撒冷被毁前的最后日子里，以西结描绘了耶和华向以色列人发出怒吼，徒劳地试图引起他们的注意，迫使他们承认他的存在。以色列只能怪自己造成了即将到来的灾难。尽管耶和华常常显得格格不入，但他却在鼓励像以西结这样的以色列人明白，历史的打击并非随机和任意的，而是有着更深层次的逻辑和公正。他试图在残酷的国际政治世界中寻找意义。

The pagan vision, on the other hand, had celebrated the continuity that was felt to exist between the gods and the natural world. Ezekiel found nothing consoling about the old religion, which he habitually called “filth.” During one of his visions, he was conducted on a guided tour of the Temple in Jerusalem. To his horror he saw that, poised as they were on the brink of destruction, the people of Judah were still worshipping pagan gods in the Temple of Yahweh. The Temple itself had become a nightmarish place: the walls of its rooms were painted with writhing snakes and repulsive animals; the priests performing the “filthy” rites were presented in a sordid light, almost as if they were engaged in backroom sex: “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the throne of Israel do in the dark, each in his painted room?”⁵¹ In another room, women sat weeping for the suffering god Tammuz. Others worshipped the sun, with their backs toward the sanctuary. Finally, the prophet watched the strange chariot he had seen in his first vision fly away, taking the “glory” of Yahweh with it. Yet Yahweh was not an entirely distant deity. In the final days before the destruction of Jerusalem, Ezekiel depicts him fulminating against the people of Israel in a vain attempt to catch their attention and force them to acknowledge him. Israel had only itself to blame for the impending catastrophe. Alien as Yahweh frequently seemed, he was encouraging Israelites like Ezekiel to see that the blows of history were not random and arbitrary but had a deeper logic and justice. He was trying to find a meaning in the cruel world of international politics.

当他们坐在巴比伦的河边时，一些流亡者不可避免地感到，他们无法在应许之地之外践行自己的宗教信仰。异教神祇历来都具有地域性，对一些人来说，在异国他乡歌颂耶和华的圣歌似乎是不可能的：他们甚至乐于想象将巴比伦的婴儿摔在岩石上，然后砸碎他们的……脑力耗尽。52^然而，一位新的先知宣扬宁静。我们对他一无所知，这或许意义重大，因为他的神谕和诗篇中没有丝毫个人挣扎的迹象，不像他的前任那样饱受磨难。由于他的作品后来被添加到以赛亚的神谕中，他通常被称为第二位以赛亚。在流亡期间，一些犹太人转而敬拜巴比伦的古代神祇，但另一些人则被推向了新的宗教意识。耶和华圣殿已成废墟；伯特利和希伯仑的古老祭祀场所也被摧毁。在巴比伦，他们无法参与那些在家乡宗教生活中至关重要的礼仪。耶和华是他们唯一的依靠。第二位以赛亚更进一步，宣告耶和华是唯一的真神。在他重写以色列历史的过程中，出埃及记的神话被赋予了许多意象，这些意象让我们想起马尔杜克战胜提亚马特（原始海洋）的故事：

As they sat beside the rivers of Babylon, some of the exiles inevitably felt that they could not practice their religion outside the Promised Land. Pagan gods had always been territorial, and for some it seemed impossible to sing the songs of Yahweh in a foreign country: they relished the prospect of hurling Babylonian babies against a rock and dashing their brains out.⁵² A new prophet, however, preached tranquillity. We know nothing about him, and this may be significant because his oracles and psalms give no sign of a personal struggle, such as those endured by his predecessors. Because his work was later added to the oracles of Isaiah, he is usually called the Second Isaiah. In exile, some of the Jews would have gone over to the worship of the ancient gods of Babylon, but others were pushed into a new religious awareness. The Temple of Yahweh was in ruins; the old cultic shrines in Beth-El and Hebron were destroyed. In Babylon they could not take part in the liturgies that had been central to their religious life at home. Yahweh was all they had. Second Isaiah took this one step further and declared that Yahweh was the only God. In his rewriting of Israelite history, the myth of the Exodus is clad in imagery that reminds us of the victory of Marduk over Tiamat, the primal sea:

第一以赛亚将历史视为神圣的警告；灾难过后，第二以赛亚在他的《安慰书》中，让历史为未来带来新的希望。既然耶和华过去曾拯救过以色列，他就能再次拯救他们。他主宰着历史的进程；在他眼中，所有非犹太人都如同水桶里的一滴水。他的确是唯一重要的神。第二以赛亚想象着巴比伦的旧神被装上马车，缓缓驶向夕阳。54他们的时代已经结束了：“我不是耶和华吗？”他反复问道，“除了我以外^，没有别的神。” ⁵⁵

First Isaiah had made history a divine warning; after the catastrophe, in his Book of Consolation, Second Isaiah made history generate new hope for the future. If Yahweh had rescued Israel once in the past, he could do it again. He was masterminding the affairs of history; in his eyes, all the goyim were nothing more than a drop of water in a bucket. He was indeed the only God who counted. Second Isaiah imagined the old deities of Babylon being bundled onto carts and trundling off into the sunset.⁵⁴ Their day was over: “Am I not Yahweh?” he asked repeatedly, “there is no other god beside me.”⁵⁵

第二，以赛亚毫不犹豫地谴责了非犹太人的神明，这些神明自灾难发生以来，似乎取得了胜利。他冷静地他们认为，创造世界的伟大神话壮举，是耶和华——而非马尔杜克或巴力——所为。以色列人第一次认真地关注耶和华在创世中的角色，这或许是因为他们重新接触到了巴比伦的宇宙神话。当然，他们并非试图从科学的角度解释宇宙的物质起源，而是在残酷的现实世界中寻求慰藉。如果耶和华在远古时期就战胜了混沌的怪物，那么救赎被掳的以色列人对他来说就易如反掌。第二以赛亚看到出埃及记的神话与异教徒在创世之初战胜混沌之水的传说如此相似，便鼓励他的子民满怀信心地期待神力的再次彰显。例如，他在这里提到了巴力战胜迦南创世神话中的海怪罗坦，罗坦也被称为拉哈伯、鳄鱼（tannīn）和深渊（tehōm ）：

Second Isaiah wasted no time denouncing the gods of the goyim, who, since the catastrophe, could have been seen as victorious. He calmly assumed that Yahweh—not Marduk or Baal—had performed the great mythical deeds that brought the world into being. For the first time, the Israelites became seriously interested in Yahweh’s role in creation, perhaps because of renewed contact with the cosmological myths of Babylon. They were not, of course, attempting a scientific account of the physical origins of the universe but were trying to find comfort in the harsh world of the present. If Yahweh had defeated the monsters of chaos in primordial time, it would be a simple matter for him to redeem the exiled Israelites. Seeing the similarity between the Exodus myth and the pagan tales of victory over watery chaos at the beginning of time, Second Isaiah urged his people to look forward confidently to a new show of divine strength. Here, for example, he refers to the victory of Baal over Lotan, the sea-monster of Canaanite creation mythology, who was also called Rahab, the Crocodile (tannīn) and the Abyss (tehōm):

耶和华最终将他的竞争对手纳入以色列人的宗教想象之中；在流亡中，异教的诱惑力消失了，犹太教由此诞生。在人们理应认为耶和华的崇拜即将消亡之际，他却成为了人们在绝境中找到希望的源泉。

Yahweh had finally absorbed his rivals in the religious imagination of Israel; in exile, the lure of paganism had lost its attraction and the religion of Judaism had been born. At a time when the cult of Yahweh might reasonably have been expected to perish, he became the means that enabled people to find hope in impossible circumstances.

因此，耶和华成了唯一的神。没有人试图从哲学角度来论证他的说法。一如既往，这种新神学的成功并非源于其理性论证，而是因为它有效地阻止了绝望，激发了希望。尽管犹太人流离失所，但他们不再觉得耶和华崇拜的断裂是陌生和令人不安的。它深刻地反映了他们的处境。

Yahweh, therefore, had become the one and only God. There was no attempt to justify his claim philosophically. As always, the new theology succeeded not because it could be demonstrated rationally but because it was effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope. Dislocated and displaced as they were, the Jews no longer found the discontinuity of the cult of Yahweh alien and disturbing. It spoke profoundly to their condition.

然而，《以赛亚书》第二卷中对上帝的描述却丝毫没有温馨之感。上帝始终超越了人类思维的理解范围：

Yet there was nothing cozy about Second Isaiah’s image of God. He remained beyond the grasp of the human mind:

上帝的本质超越了言语和概念的范畴。耶和华也并非总是按照祂子民的期望行事。在一段极具震撼力的经文中（这段经文在今天看来尤为意义深远），先知预言，埃及和亚述也将与以色列一同成为耶和华的子民。耶和华会说：“我的百姓埃及有福了！我的受造物亚述有福了！我的产业以色列有福了！” ⁵⁹祂已成为超越现实的象征，使得对拣选的狭隘解读显得渺小而不足。

The reality of God lay beyond the reach of words and concepts. Nor would Yahweh always do what his people expected. In a very daring passage, which has particular poignancy today, the prophet looks forward to a time when Egypt and Assyria would also become the people of Yahweh, alongside Israel. Yahweh would say: “Blessed be my people Egypt, Assyria my creature, and Israel my heritage.”⁵⁹ He had become the symbol of transcendent reality that made narrow interpretations of election seem petty and inadequate.

公元前539年，波斯国王居鲁士征服巴比伦帝国，似乎印证了先知的预言。居鲁士并未将波斯诸神强加于他的新臣民，而是在凯旋进入巴比伦时，前往马尔杜克神庙进行祭拜。他还将被巴比伦人征服的各民族的神像归还其原址。如今，世界已习惯于生活在庞大的国际帝国之中，居鲁士或许无需再沿用旧式的驱逐手段。如果臣民在其领土上敬拜自己的神灵，无疑会减轻他的统治负担。在他的帝国境内，他鼓励重建古代神庙，并反复声称这是神灵赋予他的使命。他体现了某些异教形式的宽容和远见。公元前538年，居鲁士颁布诏令，允许犹太人返回犹大，重建他们的圣殿。然而，他们中的大多数人选择留下：从此只有少数人能生活在应许之地。《圣经》记载，42360名犹太人离开巴比伦和特拉维夫，开始返乡之旅，并将他们新近皈依的犹太教强加给那些留下来、不知所措的同胞。

When Cyrus, King of Persia, conquered the Babylonian empire in 539 BCE, it seemed as though the prophets had been vindicated. Cyrus did not impose the Persian gods on his new subjects but worshipped at the Temple of Marduk when he entered Babylon in triumph. He also restored the effigies of the gods belonging to the peoples conquered by the Babylonians to their original homes. Now that the world had become accustomed to living in giant international empires, Cyrus probably did not need to impose the old methods of deportation. It would ease the burden of rule if his subject peoples worshipped their own gods in their own territories. Throughout his empire, he encouraged the restoration of ancient temples, claiming repeatedly that their gods had charged him with the task. He was an example of the tolerance and breadth of vision of some forms of pagan religion. In 538 Cyrus issued an edict permitting the Jews to return to Judah and rebuild their own temple. Most of them, however, elected to stay behind: henceforth only a minority would live in the Promised Land. The Bible tells us that 42,360 Jews left Babylon and Tel Aviv and began the trek home, where they imposed their new Judaism on their bewildered brethren who had remained behind.

我们可以从祭司传统（P）的著作中看出这其中的含义。这些著作写于被掳之后，并被插入到摩西五经中。它们对约瑟和以西结所描述的事件提出了自己的解释，并增添了《民数记》和《利未记》两卷新书。正如我们所预料的，祭司对耶和华持有崇高而深刻的见解。例如，他不相信任何人能够像约瑟所描述的那样真正地看见上帝。与以西结的许多观点相似，他认为人类对上帝的感知与上帝的本质之间存在着区别。现实本身。在P所讲述的摩西在西奈山的故事中，摩西恳求见到耶和华，耶和华回答说：“你不能看见我的面，因为没有人能看见我而存活。” ⁶⁰因此，摩西必须躲在岩石缝隙中，才能躲避神圣的冲击。在那里，他只能瞥见耶和华离去的身影，如同事后回望一般。P提出的这个概念在上帝的历史上变得极其重要。世人只能看到神圣临在的余晖，他称之为“耶和华的荣耀（kavod）”，是上帝临在的一种显现，但不能将其与上帝本身混淆。 ⁶¹当摩西从山上下来时，他的脸上映照着这“荣耀”，散发出如此耀眼的光芒，以至于以色列人无法直视他。 ⁶²

We can see what this entailed in the writings of the Priestly tradition (P), which were written after the exile and inserted into the Pentateuch. This gave its own interpretation of the events described by J and E and added two new books, Numbers and Leviticus. As we might expect, P had an exalted and sophisticated view of Yahweh. He did not believe, for example, that anybody could actually see God in the way that J had suggested. Sharing many of the perspectives of Ezekiel, he believed that there was a distinction between the human perception of God and the reality itself. In P’s story of Moses on Sinai, Moses begs for a vision of Yahweh, who replies: “You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and live.”⁶⁰ Instead, Moses must shield himself from the divine impact in a crevice of the rock, where he would catch a glimpse of Yahweh as he departed, in a kind of hindsight. P had introduced an idea that would become extremely important in the history of God. Men and women can see only an afterglow of the divine presence, which he calls “the glory (kavod) of Yahweh,” a manifestation of his presence, which is not to be confused with God himself.⁶¹ When Moses came down from the mountain, his own face had reflected this “glory” and shone with such unbearable light that the Israelites could not look upon him.⁶²

耶和华的“荣耀”象征着他在地上的临在，因此，它强调了人所创造的有限的上帝形象与上帝本身的圣洁之间的区别。这便是对以色列宗教中偶像崇拜本质的一种制衡。当P回顾出埃及记的古老故事时，他并没有想象耶和华亲自陪伴以色列人在旷野漂流：那样做是不恰当的拟人化。相反，他展现的是耶和华的“荣耀”充满他与摩西相遇的帐幕。同样，也只有“耶和华的荣耀”才能居住在圣殿中^。63

The “glory” of Yahweh was a symbol of his presence on earth and, as such, it emphasized the difference between the limited images of God created by men and women and the holiness of God himself. It was thus a counterbalance to the idolatrous nature of Israelite religion. When P looked back to the old stories of the Exodus, he did not imagine that Yahweh had himself accompanied the Israelites during their wanderings: that would be unseemly anthropomorphism. Instead, he shows the “glory” of Yahweh filling the tent where he met with Moses. Similarly it would only be the “glory of Yahweh” that would dwell in the Temple.⁶³

P对摩西五经最著名的贡献当然是创世记第一章的创世记述，其灵感源自《埃努玛·埃利什》。P从原始深渊（希腊文为tehom ，是“提亚马特”的讹误）的水开始，耶和华用这水创造了天地。然而，这里并没有诸神之战，也没有与雅姆、罗坦或喇合的争斗。唯有耶和华创造了万物。现实并非逐渐显现；相反，耶和华以毫不费力的意志创造了秩序。自然，P并不认为世界是神圣的，与耶和华由相同的物质构成。事实上，“分离”的概念对P的神学至关重要：耶和华通过将昼夜、水陆、光明与黑暗分离，使宇宙成为一个有序的地方。在每个阶段，耶和华都祝福并圣化了创造物，并宣告其为“好的”。与巴比伦的故事不同，人类的创造是创世的高潮，而非滑稽的插曲。男人和女人或许不具备神性，但他们是按照上帝的形象创造的：他们必须延续上帝的创造使命。如同《埃努玛·埃利什》中所述，六天的创造之后是第七天的安息日：在巴比伦的记载中，这一天是大会召开“决定命运”并授予马尔杜克神圣称号的日子。而在P中，安息日则具有象征意义，与之形成对比。回到第一天盛行的原始混沌状态。这种说教式的语气和重复表明，P 的创世故事也像《埃努玛·埃利什》一样，是为礼拜仪式吟诵而设计的，旨在颂扬耶和华的作为，并尊他为以色列的创造者和统治者^。64

P’s most famous contribution to the Pentateuch was, of course, the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis, which drew upon the Enuma Elish. P began with the waters of the primordial abyss (tehom, a corruption of “Tiamat”), out of which Yahweh fashioned the heavens and earth. There was no battle of the Gods, however, or struggle with Yam, Lotan or Rahab. Yahweh alone was responsible for calling all things into being. There was no gradual emanation of reality; instead Yahweh achieved order by an effortless act of will. Naturally, P did not conceive the world as divine, composed of the same stuff as Yahweh. Indeed, the notion of “separation” is crucial to P’s theology: Yahweh made the cosmos an ordered place by separating night from day, water from dry land and light from darkness. At each stage, Yahweh blessed and sanctified the creation and pronounced it “good.” Unlike in the Babylonian story, the making of man was the climax of creation, not a comic afterthought. Men and women might not share the divine nature, but they had been created in the image of God: they must carry on his creative tasks. As in the Enuma Elish, the six days of creation were followed by a sabbatical rest on the seventh day: in the Babylonian account, this had been the day when the Great Assembly had met to “fix the destinies” and confer the divine titles upon Marduk. In P, the sabbath stood in symbolic contrast to the primordial chaos that had prevailed on Day One. The didactic tone and repetitions suggest that P’s creation story was also designed for liturgical recital, like the Enuma Elish, to extol the work of Yahweh and enthrone him as Creator and Ruler of Israel.⁶⁴

自然而然，新圣殿在P的犹太教信仰中占据核心地位。在近东，圣殿常常被视为宇宙的复制品。建造圣殿是一种模仿神的行为，使人类得以参与到神明的创造之中。在流亡期间，许多犹太人从约柜的古老故事中找到了慰藉。约柜是上帝与他的子民“支搭帐篷”（shakan）的移动圣所，上帝在其中与他们一同流离失所。当P描述在旷野中建造圣所——会幕时，他借鉴了古老的神话。会幕的建筑设计并非原创，而是对神圣模型的复制：耶和华在西奈山上给了摩西非常详细而冗长的指示：“你要为我建造圣所，使我可以住在你们中间。建造帐幕和其中的器具时，你们要照着我所指示你们的样式。” ⁶⁵这段关于建造圣所的冗长描述显然并非意在按字面意思理解；谁也想不到，古代以色列人竟然真的建造了一座如此精美的圣殿，其材质包括“金、银、铜，紫色织物，紫罗兰色和红色织物，深红色织物，细麻布，山羊毛，公羊皮，皂荚木……”等等。⁶⁶这段冗长的描述与P的创世故事极为相似。在建造的每个阶段，摩西都“见证了所有的工程”，并像耶和华在创世六日中那样“祝福”百姓。圣殿建于正月的第一天；圣殿的建筑师比撒列受到神灵（ruach elohim）的启示，这神灵也曾掌管世界的创造；这两个记载都强调了安息日的重要性。 ⁶⁷圣殿的建造也象征着人类破坏世界之前原本存在的和谐。

Naturally the new Temple was central to P’s Judaism. In the Near East, the temple had often been seen as a replica of the cosmos. Temple-building had been an act of imitatio dei, enabling humanity to participate in the creativity of the gods themselves. During the exile, many of the Jews had found consolation in the old stories of the Ark of the Covenant, the portable shrine in which God had “set up his tent” (shakan) with his people and shared their homelessness. When he described the building of the sanctuary, the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness, P drew upon the old mythology. Its architectural design was not original but a copy of the divine model: Moses is given very long and detailed instructions by Yahweh on Sinai: “Build me a sanctuary so that I may dwell among you. In making the tabernacle and the furnishings, you must follow exactly the pattern I shall show you.”⁶⁵ The long account of the construction of this sanctuary is clearly not intended to be taken literally; nobody imagined that the ancient Israelites had really built such an elaborate shrine of “gold, silver and bronze, purple stuffs, of violet shade and red, crimson stuffs, fine linen, goats hair, rams skin, acacia wood …” and so forth.⁶⁶ This lengthy interpolation is heavily reminiscent of P’s creation story. At each stage of the construction, Moses “saw all the work,” and “blessed” the people, like Yahweh on the six days of creation. The sanctuary was built on the first day of the first month of the year; Bezalel, the architect of the shrine, was inspired by the spirit of God (ruach elohim) which also brooded over the creation of the world; and both accounts emphasize the importance of the sabbath rest.⁶⁷ Temple-building was also a symbol of the original harmony that had prevailed before mankind had ruined the world.

在《申命记》中，安息日的设立是为了让所有人，包括奴隶，都能休息一天，并提醒以色列人出埃及的功绩。68 ^P赋予了安息日新的意义：它成为效法上帝和纪念上帝创造世界的行为。当犹太人遵守安息日的休息时，他们实际上是在参与上帝最初独自遵守的仪式：这是一种象征性地尝试活出神圣生命的尝试。在旧时的异教信仰中，人类的一切行为都模仿着神的行为，但对耶和华的崇拜却揭示了神圣世界与人间世界之间巨大的鸿沟。如今，犹太人被鼓励通过遵守摩西律法来亲近耶和华。《申命记》列举了许多……这些强制性律法包括十诫。在被掳期间及被掳后不久，这些律法被扩展成一套复杂的法律体系，即摩西五经中的613条诫命（mitzvot）。这些细枝末节的指示在外人看来似乎令人难以接受，新约的论战也常常以非常负面的视角来解读它们。然而，犹太人并没有像基督徒通常认为的那样，将这些诫命视为沉重的负担，而是将其视为一种象征性的、与神同在的生活方式。在申命记中，饮食律法是以色列特殊地位的标志。69 ^P也认为这些律法是一种仪式化的尝试，旨在分享神的圣洁与分离，弥合人与神之间痛苦的隔阂。当以色列人效法神的创造行为，将奶与肉、洁净与不洁净、安息日与一周的其他日子分开时，人性便得以圣化。

In Deuteronomy the sabbath had been designed to give everybody, slaves included, a day off and to remind the Israelites of the Exodus.⁶⁸ P has given the sabbath a new significance: it becomes an act of the imitation of God and a commemoration of his creation of the world. When they observed the sabbath rest, Jews were participating in a ritual that God had originally observed alone: it was a symbolic attempt to live the divine life. In the old paganism, every human act had imitated the actions of the gods, but the cult of Yahweh had revealed a huge gulf between the divine and human worlds. Now Jews were encouraged to come closer to Yahweh by observing the Torah of Moses. Deuteronomy had listed a number of obligatory laws, which had included the Ten Commandments. During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated into a complex legislation consisting of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Pentateuch. These minute directives seem off-putting to an outsider and have been presented in a very negative light by New Testament polemic. Jews did not find them a crushing burden, as Christians tend to imagine, but found that they were a symbolic way of living in the presence of God. In Deuteronomy, the dietary laws had been a sign of Israel’s special status.⁶⁹ P also saw them as a ritualized attempt to share the holy separateness of God, healing the painful severance between man and the divine. Human nature could be sanctified when Israelites imitated God’s creative actions by separating milk from meat, clean from unclean and sabbath from the rest of the week.

祭司传统的著作与约拿书、以赛亚书和申命记的叙述一同被收录在摩西五经中。这提醒我们，任何主要的宗教都包含许多独立的愿景和灵性体系。一些犹太人始终更倾向于申命记中的上帝，祂拣选以色列，使其与非犹太人（goyim）彻底分离；一些人则将这种倾向延伸到弥赛亚神话中，这些神话预言了末日耶和华的日子，届时上帝将高举以色列，羞辱其他民族。这些神话故事往往将上帝视为一位遥不可及的存在。人们心照不宣地认为，被掳之后，预言的时代已经终结。人与上帝之间不再有直接的联系：这种联系只能通过象征性的异象来实现，这些异象被赋予了遥远过去的伟大人物，例如以诺和但以理。

The work of the Priestly tradition was included in the Pentateuch alongside the narratives of J and E and the Deuteronomist. This is a reminder that any major religion consists of a number of independent visions and spiritualities. Some Jews would always feel more drawn to the Deuteronomic God, who had chosen Israel to be aggressively separate from the goyim; some extended this into the Messianic myths that looked forward to the Day of Yahweh at the end of time, when he would exalt Israel and humiliate the other nations. These mythological accounts tended to see God as a very distant being. It had been tacitly agreed that after the exile, the era of prophecy had ceased. There was to be no more direct contact with God: this was only achieved in the symbolic visions attributed to the great figures of the remote past, such as Enoch and Daniel.

这些遥远的英雄中，有一位在巴比伦被尊为忍耐苦难的典范，他就是约伯。被掳之后，一位幸存者借用这个古老的传说，提出了关于上帝的本质以及他对人类苦难的责任等根本性问题。在旧约中，约伯曾受上帝的考验；因为他以忍耐忍受了不应承受的苦难，上帝便以恢复他昔日繁荣作为奖赏。在新版的约伯记中，作者将旧约一分为二，让约伯对上帝的行为感到愤怒。约伯与他的三位安慰者一起，敢于质疑上帝的旨意，并展开了一场激烈的思想辩论。在犹太宗教史上，宗教想象力首次转向了更为抽象的思辨。先知们曾声称，上帝允许以色列受苦是因为他们的罪孽；而《约伯记》的作者表明，一些以色列人不再满足于传统的解释。约伯抨击了这种观点，并揭示了……约伯的理性思维能力不足，但上帝突然打断了他激烈的思辨。上帝在异象中向约伯显现，指出他所创造的世界的奇妙：像约伯这样渺小的生灵怎敢与至高无上的上帝争辩？约伯顺服了，但现代读者如果想对苦难问题寻求更连贯、更具哲学性的解答，就不会对这个答案感到满意。然而，《约伯记》的作者并非否认人们质疑的权利，而是指出单凭理性无法应对这些深不可测的问题。理性的思辨必须让位于来自上帝的直接启示，就像先知们所领受的那样。

One of these distant heroes, venerated in Babylon as an example of patience in suffering, was Job. After the exile, one of the survivors used this old legend to ask fundamental questions about the nature of God and his responsibility for the sufferings of humanity. In the old story, Job had been tested by God; because he had borne his unmerited sufferings with patience, God had rewarded him by restoring his former prosperity. In the new version of the Job story, the author split the old legend in half and made Job rage against God’s behavior. Together with his three comforters, Job dares to question the divine decrees and engages in a fierce intellectual debate. For the first time in Jewish religious history, the religious imagination had turned to speculation of a more abstract nature. The prophets had claimed that God had allowed Israel to suffer because of its sins; the author of Job shows that some Israelites were no longer satisfied by the traditional answer. Job attacks this view and reveals its intellectual inadequacy, but God suddenly cuts into his furious speculation. He reveals himself to Job in a vision, pointing to the marvels of the world he has created: how could a puny little creature like Job dare to argue with the transcendent God? Job submits, but a modern reader, who is looking for a more coherent and philosophical answer to the problem of suffering, will not be satisfied with this solution. The author of Job is not denying the right to question, however, but suggesting that the intellect alone is not equipped to deal with these imponderable matters. Intellectual speculation must give way to a direct revelation from God such as the prophets received.

犹太人当时尚未开始哲学思考，但在公元前四世纪，他们受到了希腊理性主义的影响。公元前332年，马其顿的亚历山大击败了波斯的达里乌斯三世，希腊人开始殖民亚洲和非洲。他们在推罗、西顿、加沙、费城（安曼）、的黎波里，甚至示剑等地建立了城邦。巴勒斯坦和散居各地的犹太人被希腊文化所包围，有些人对此感到不安，但也有人被希腊的戏剧、哲学、体育和诗歌所吸引。他们学习希腊语，在体育馆锻炼身体，并取了希腊名字。一些人甚至作为雇佣兵加入希腊军队作战。他们甚至将自己的圣经翻译成希腊语，形成了被称为《七十士译本》的版本。就这样，一些希腊人认识了以色列的上帝，并决定与宙斯和狄俄尼索斯一起敬拜耶和华（或他们所称的伊阿奥）。一些人被犹太会堂或聚会场所所吸引，这些场所是散居各地的犹太人取代圣殿崇拜而建立的。在那里，他们诵读经文、祈祷、聆听布道。犹太会堂与古代世界其他宗教场所截然不同。由于没有仪式或献祭，它更像是一所哲学学院。每当有知名的犹太传教士来到城镇，许多人便会涌向会堂，排队聆听他们自己的哲学家的教诲。一些希腊人甚至遵循《托拉》的部分内容，并加入了犹太人的融合教派。公元前四世纪，曾出现过犹太人和希腊人将耶和华与希腊神祇融合的个别案例。

The Jews had not yet begun to philosophize, but during the fourth century they came under the influence of Greek rationalism. In 332 BCE Alexander of Macedonia defeated Darius III of Persia and the Greeks began to colonize Asia and Africa. They founded city-states in Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Philadelphia (Amman) and Tripolis and even at Shechem. The Jews of Palestine and the diaspora were surrounded by a Hellenic culture which some found disturbing, but others were excited by Greek theater, philosophy, sport and poetry. They learned Greek, exercised at the gymnasium and took Greek names. Some fought as mercenaries in the Greek armies. They even translated their own scriptures into Greek, producing the version known as the Septuagint. Thus some Greeks came to know the God of Israel and decided to worship Yahweh (or Iao, as they called him) alongside Zeus and Dionysus. Some were attracted to the synagogues or meeting houses which the diaspora Jews had evolved in place of the Temple worship. There they read their scriptures, prayed and listened to sermons. The synagogue was unlike anything else in the rest of the ancient religious world. Since there was no ritual or sacrifice, it must have seemed more like a school of philosophy, and many flocked to the synagogue if a well-known Jewish preacher came to town, as they would queue up to hear their own philosophers. Some Greeks even observed selected parts of the Torah and joined Jews in syncretist sects. During the fourth century BCE, there were isolated instances of Jews and Greeks merging Yahweh with one of the Greek gods.

然而，大多数犹太人保持疏离，中东希腊化城市中的犹太人和希腊人之间逐渐产生了紧张关系。在古代世界，宗教并非私事。神祇对城市至关重要，人们相信，如果忽视对神的崇拜，神祇就会收回庇佑。声称这些神祇并不存在的人，被称作“无神论者”和社会的敌人。到了公元前二世纪，这种敌意已经根深蒂固：在巴勒斯坦，甚至出现了犹太人与希腊人之间的冲突。当塞琉古总督安条克四世·伊皮法尼斯试图将耶路撒冷希腊化并将宙斯崇拜引入圣殿时，爆发了一场起义。犹太人开始创作自己的文学作品，认为智慧并非希腊人的聪明才智，而是对耶和华的敬畏。智慧文学在中东地区是一种成熟的文学体裁；它试图探究人生的意义，但并非通过哲学反思，而是通过探寻最佳的生活方式：它往往非常务实。《箴言》的作者生活在公元前三世纪，他更进一步提出，智慧是上帝创造世界时所制定的宏伟蓝图，因此是上帝创造的第一个生命。正如我们将在第四章中看到的，这一观点对早期基督徒来说非常重要。作者将智慧人格化，使她看起来像一个独立的个体：

Most Jews held aloof, however, and tension developed between Jews and Greeks in the Hellenistic cities of the Middle East. In the ancient world, religion was not a private matter. The gods were extremely important to the city, and it was believed that they would withdraw their patronage if their cult were neglected. Jews, who claimed that these gods did not exist, were called “atheists” and enemies of society. By the second century BCE this hostility was entrenched: in Palestine there had even been a revolt when Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid governor, had attempted to Hellenize Jerusalem and introduce the cult of Zeus into the Temple. Jews had started to produce their own literature, which argued that wisdom was not Greek cleverness but the fear of Yahweh. Wisdom literature was a well-established genre in the Middle East; it tried to delve into the meaning of life, not by philosophical reflection, but by inquiring into the best way to live: it was often highly pragmatic. The author of the Book of Proverbs, who was writing in the third century BCE, went a little further and suggested that Wisdom was the master plan that God had devised when he had created the world and, as such, was the first of his creatures. This idea would be very important to the early Christians, as we shall see in Chapter 4. The author personifies Wisdom so that she seems a separate person:

然而，智慧并非神圣的存在，而是明确地被描述为由上帝创造的。她类似于祭司作者所描述的上帝的“荣耀”，代表着人类在创造和人类事务中得以窥见的上帝的计划：作者描绘智慧（Hokhmah）在街头游荡，呼唤人们敬畏耶和华。公元前二世纪，耶路撒冷虔诚的犹太人耶稣·本·西拉也描绘了类似的智慧形象。他让智慧在神圣的议会中站立，歌颂自己的荣耀：她作为神圣的圣言，从至高者的口中发出，上帝藉此创造了世界；她存在于万物之中，但最终定居在以色列人中间^。71

Wisdom was not a divine being, however, but is specifically said to have been created by God. She is similar to the “glory” of God described by the Priestly authors, representing the plan of God that human beings could glimpse in creation and in human affairs: the author represents Wisdom (Hokhmah) wandering through the streets, calling people to fear Yahweh. In the second century BCE, Jesus ben Sira, a devout Jew of Jerusalem, painted a similar portrait of Wisdom. He makes her stand up in the Divine Council and sing her own praises: she had come forth from the mouth of the Most High as the divine Word by which God had created the world; she is present everywhere in creation but has taken up permanent residence among the people of Israel.⁷¹

如同耶和华的“荣耀”一样，智慧的形象象征着上帝在世间的作为。犹太人对耶和华抱有如此崇高的观念，以至于很难想象他会直接干预人类事务。与P一样，他们更倾向于将我们能够认识和体验的上帝与神圣的现实本身区分开来。当我们读到……神圣的智慧离开上帝，游历人间寻找人类，这不禁让人联想起伊什塔尔、阿纳特和伊西斯等异教女神，她们也曾从神圣世界降临，肩负救赎的使命。大约公元前50年，智慧文学在亚历山大城带上了论战的色彩。在《所罗门智慧书》中，一位来自亚历山大城的犹太人（当时那里有一个重要的犹太社群）告诫犹太人要抵制周围诱人的希腊文化，坚守自己的传统：敬畏耶和华，而非希腊哲学，才是真正的智慧。他用希腊语写作，并将智慧（索菲亚）人格化，论证智慧与犹太教的上帝密不可分。

Like the “glory” of Yahweh, the figure of Wisdom was a symbol of God’s activity in the world. Jews were cultivating such an exalted notion of Yahweh that it was difficult to imagine him intervening directly in human affairs. Like P, they preferred to distinguish the God we could know and experience from the divine reality itself. When we read of the divine Wisdom leaving God to wander through the world in search of humanity, it is hard not to be reminded of the pagan goddesses such as Ishtar, Anat and Isis, who had also descended from the divine world in a redemptive mission. Wisdom literature acquired a polemic edge in Alexandria in about 50 BCE. In The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jew of Alexandria, where there was an important Jewish community, warned Jews to resist the seductive Hellenic culture around them and to remain true to their own traditions: it is the fear of Yahweh, not Greek philosophy, which constitutes true wisdom. Writing in Greek, he also personified Wisdom (Sophia) and argued that it could not be separated from the Jewish God:

这段经文对于基督徒探讨耶稣的地位也极其重要。然而，犹太作者仅仅将索菲亚视为不可知的上帝的一个面向，祂为了适应人类的理解而调整了自身。她是上帝向人类启示的形象，是人类对上帝的感知，与上帝的完整本质有着神秘的差异，而上帝的完整本质永远超出我们的理解范围。

This passage would also be extremely important to Christians when they came to discuss the status of Jesus. The Jewish author, however, simply saw Sophia as an aspect of the unknowable God who has adapted himself to human understanding. She is God-as-he-has-revealed-himself-to-man, the human perception of God, mysteriously distinct from the full reality of God, which would always elude our understanding.

《所罗门智慧书》的作者敏锐地察觉到希腊思想与犹太宗教之间的张力，这一点不无道理。我们已经看到，亚里士多德的上帝几乎不了解自己所创造的世界，而圣经中的上帝却热切地参与到人类事务中，两者之间存在着至关重要的、或许是不可调和的差异。希腊的上帝可以通过人类的理性去发现，而圣经中的上帝则只能通过启示来显现自身。耶和华与世界之间隔着一道鸿沟，但希腊人相信，理性的恩赐使人类与上帝亲近；因此，他们可以通过自身的努力接近上帝。然而，每当一神论者爱上希腊哲学时，他们总是不可避免地想要将希腊的上帝融入到自己的信仰体系中。这将是我们故事的主要主题之一。最早尝试这样做的人之一是杰出的犹太哲学家亚历山大的斐洛（约公元前30年—公元45年）。斐洛是柏拉图主义者，同时也是一位享有盛誉的理性主义哲学家。他用优美的希腊语写作，似乎不会说希伯来语，然而他他也是一位虔诚的犹太教徒，遵守诫命。他认为自己的上帝与希腊人的上帝之间并无冲突。然而，必须指出的是，斐洛的上帝似乎与耶和华截然不同。首先，斐洛似乎对圣经中的历史篇章感到尴尬，他试图将其转化为复杂的寓言故事：我们不妨回顾一下，亚里士多德曾认为历史与哲学无关。他的上帝不具备任何人性：例如，说他“愤怒”是完全错误的。我们对上帝的认知仅限于他存在这一事实。然而，作为一名虔诚的犹太教徒，斐洛确实相信上帝曾向先知们显现。这又是如何实现的呢？

The author of The Wisdom of Solomon was right to sense a tension between Greek thought and Jewish religion. We have seen that there is a crucial and, perhaps, an irreconcilable difference between the God of Aristotle, which is scarcely aware of the world it has created, and the God of the Bible, who is passionately involved in human affairs. The Greek God could be discovered by human reason, whereas the God of the Bible only made himself known by means of revelation. A chasm separated Yahweh from the world, but Greeks believed that the gift of reason made human beings kin to God; they could, therefore, reach him by their own efforts. Yet whenever monotheists fell in love with Greek philosophy, they inevitably wanted to try to adapt its God to their own. This will be one of the major themes of our story. One of the first people to make this attempt was the eminent Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 30 BCE–45 CE). Philo was a Platonist and had a distinguished reputation as a rationalist philosopher in his own right. He wrote in beautiful Greek and does not seem to have spoken Hebrew, yet he was also a devout Jew and an observer of the mitzvot. He could see no incompatibility between his God and the God of the Greeks. It must be said, however, that Philo’s God seems very different from Yahweh. For one thing, Philo seemed embarrassed by the historical books of the Bible, which he tried to turn into elaborate allegories: Aristotle, it will be recalled, had considered history unphilosophical. His God has no human qualities: it is quite incorrect, for example, to say that he is “angry.” All we can know about God is the bare fact of his existence. Yet, as a practicing Jew, Philo did believe that God had revealed himself to the prophets. How had this been possible?

斐洛通过区分上帝的本质（ousia，完全不可理解）和他在世间的活动（他称之为“能力”（dynameis）或“能量”（energeiai））解决了这个问题。这基本上与柏拉图和智慧书作者的解答类似。我们永远无法真正认识上帝本身。斐洛让上帝告诉摩西：“对我的理解超越了人性，甚至整个天地宇宙都无法容纳。” ⁷³为了适应我们有限的智力，上帝通过他的“能力”与我们沟通，这些能力似乎等同于柏拉图的神圣理念（尽管斐洛对此并非始终如一）。它们是人类心智所能把握的最高实在。斐洛认为它们源于上帝，正如柏拉图和亚里士多德认为宇宙永恒地源于第一因一样。其中两种能力尤为重要。斐洛称它们为君王之力，它揭示了宇宙秩序中的上帝；以及创造之力，上帝藉此在赐予人类的祝福中彰显自身。这两种力量都不可与神圣本质（ousia）混淆，后者始终笼罩在深不可测的奥秘之中。它们仅仅使我们能够瞥见超越我们所能想象的现实。有时，斐洛会谈到上帝的本质（ousia ）与君王之力和创造之力并存，形成一种三位一体的局面。例如，当他解读耶和华在幔利与两位天使一同造访亚伯拉罕的故事时，他认为这是上帝本质（ ousia） ——即“自有永有者”——与两种更高层次的力量的寓言式呈现^。74

Philo solved the problem by making an important distinction between God’s essence (ousia), which is entirely incomprehensible, and his activities in the world, which he called his “powers” (dynameis) or “energies” (energeiai). Basically, it was similar to the solution of P and the Wisdom writers. We can never know God as he is in himself. Philo makes him tell Moses: “The apprehension of me is something more than human nature, yea, even the whole heaven and universe, will be able to contain.”⁷³ To adapt himself to our limited intellect, God communicates through his “powers,” which seem equivalent to Plato’s divine forms (though Philo is not always consistent about this). They are the highest realities that the human mind can grasp. Philo sees them emanating from God, rather as Plato and Aristotle had seen the cosmos emanating eternally from the First Cause. Two of these powers were especially important. Philo called them the Kingly power, which reveals God in the order of the universe, and the Creative power, whereby God reveals himself in the blessings he bestows upon humanity. Neither of these powers is to be confused with the divine essence (ousia), which remains shrouded in impenetrable mystery. They simply enable us to catch a glimpse of a reality which is beyond anything we can conceive. Sometimes Philo speaks of God’s essential being (ousia) flanked by the Kingly and Creative powers in a kind of trinity. When he interprets the story of Yahweh’s visit to Abraham at Mamre with the two angels, for example, he argues that this is an allegorical presentation of God’s ousia—He Who Is—with the two senior powers.⁷⁴

J 对此会感到惊讶，事实上，犹太人一直觉得斐洛的上帝观有些不真实。然而，基督徒会发现他的理论大有裨益，而希腊人，正如我们将看到的，抓住了上帝不可知的“本质”与使我们认识他的“能量”之间的区别。他们也会受到他关于神圣逻各斯的理论的影响。就像智慧书的作者们一样，斐洛认为上帝制定了一个创造的总体计划（逻各斯），这与柏拉图的理念界相对应。这些理念随后化身为物质宇宙。然而，斐洛的观点并非始终一致。有时他认为逻各斯是诸力之一；有时他又似乎认为逻各斯高于诸力，是人类所能达到的最高上帝理念。然而，当我们沉思逻各斯时，我们并不会形成关于上帝的肯定性知识：我们超越了论证理性的范畴，进入一种直觉的领悟，这种领悟“高于任何思维方式，比任何仅仅是思考的东西都更珍贵”。 ⁷⁵这与柏拉图的沉思（理论）类似。斐洛坚持认为，我们永远无法触及上帝本身：我们所能领悟的最高真理是对上帝完全超越人类心智的欣喜领悟。

J would have been astonished by this and, indeed, Jews have always found Philo’s conception of God somewhat inauthentic. Christians, however, would find him enormously helpful, and the Greeks, as we shall see, seized upon this distinction between God’s unknowable “essence” and the “energies” that make him known to us. They would also be influenced by his theory of the divine Logos. Like the Wisdom writers, Philo imagined that God had formed a master plan (logos) of creation, which corresponded to Plato’s realm of the forms. These forms were then incarnated in the physical universe. Again, Philo is not always consistent. Sometimes he suggests that Logos is one of the powers; at other times he seems to think it is higher than the powers, the highest idea of God that human beings can attain. When we contemplate the Logos, however, we form no positive knowledge of God: we are taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to an intuitive apprehension which is “higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything which is merely thought.”⁷⁵ It was an activity similar to Plato’s contemplation (theoria). Philo insisted that we will never reach God as he is in himself: the highest truth we can apprehend is the rapturous recognition that God utterly transcends the human mind.

这听起来或许有些悲观，但事实并非如此。斐洛描述了一段充满激情、无比喜悦的未知之旅，这段旅程带给他自由和创造力。如同柏拉图一样，他认为灵魂如同流放者，被困于物质世界。它必须升华到上帝——它真正的家园——并抛弃激情、感官乃至语言，因为这些都将我们束缚于这个不完美的世界。最终，它将达到一种狂喜的境界，超越自我沉闷的局限，进入一个更广阔、更完整的现实。我们已经看到，对上帝的理解往往是一种想象的练习。先知们反思他们的经历，并认为这些经历可以归因于他们称之为上帝的存在。斐洛表明，宗教冥想与其他形式的创造有很多共同之处。他说，有时他苦苦钻研书籍却毫无进展，但有时他又感到自己被神性所附身：

This is not as bleak as it sounds. Philo described a passionate, joyful voyage into the unknown, which brought him liberation and creative energy. Like Plato, he saw the soul as in exile, trapped in the physical world of matter. It must ascend to God, its true home, leaving passion, the senses and even language behind, because these bind us to the imperfect world. Finally, it will achieve an ecstasy that lifts it above the dreary confines of the ego to a larger, fuller reality. We have seen that the conception of God has often been an imaginative exercise. Prophets had reflected upon their experience and felt that it could be ascribed to the being they called God. Philo shows that religious contemplation had much in common with other forms of creativity. There were times, he says, when he struggled grimly with his books and made no headway, but sometimes he felt possessed by the divine:

不久之后，犹太人将无法与希腊世界实现这种融合。在斐洛去世的那一年，亚历山大发生了针对犹太社群的屠杀，人们普遍担心犹太人会发动起义。公元前一世纪，罗马人在北非和中东建立起帝国后，他们自己也面临着同样的问题。他们逐渐接受了希腊文化，将祖先的神祇与希腊诸神融合，并热情地接受了希腊哲学。然而，他们并没有继承希腊人对犹太人的敌意。事实上，他们往往更倾向于犹太人而非希腊人，认为犹太人在那些对罗马仍有敌意的希腊城邦中是有用的盟友。犹太人享有充分的宗教自由：他们的宗教历史悠久，这一点也得到了尊重。即使在巴勒斯坦——一个不太容易接受外来统治的地方——犹太人和罗马人之间的关系通常也很好。到了公元1世纪，犹太教在罗马帝国占据了非常强大的地位。整个帝国十分之一的人口是犹太人：在斐洛的亚历山大城，犹太人占总人口的百分之四十。罗马帝国的人们正在寻求新的宗教解决方案；一神论思想盛行，地方神祇越来越被视为更宏大神性的体现。罗马人被犹太教高尚的道德品质所吸引。那些不愿接受割礼并遵守整部《托拉》的人，往往成为犹太会堂的荣誉会员，被称为“敬畏上帝者”。他们的人数不断增加：甚至有人认为，弗拉维王朝的一位皇帝可能皈依了犹太教，就像君士坦丁后来皈依基督教一样。然而，在巴勒斯坦，一群政治狂热分子强烈反对罗马的统治。公元66年，他们策划了一场反抗罗马的叛乱，令人难以置信的是，他们竟然成功地与罗马军队周旋了四年之久。当局担心叛乱会蔓延到散居各地的犹太人，被迫无情镇压。公元70年，新皇帝韦斯帕芗的军队最终攻占了耶路撒冷，将圣殿夷为平地，并将这座城市改为罗马城市，名为埃利亚·卡皮托拉纳。犹太人再次被迫流亡。

Soon it would be impossible for Jews to achieve such a synthesis with the Greek world. In the year of Philo’s death there were pogroms against the Jewish community in Alexandria and widespread fears of Jewish insurrection. When the Romans had established their empire in North Africa and the Middle East in the first century BCE they had themselves succumbed to the Greek culture, merging their ancestral deities with the Greek pantheon and adopting Greek philosophy with enthusiasm. They had not, however, inherited the Greek hostility to the Jews. Indeed, they often favored the Jews over the Greeks, regarding them as useful allies in Greek cities where there was residual hostility to Rome. Jews were given full religious liberty: their religion was known to be of great antiquity, and this was respected. Relations between Jews and Romans were usually good even in Palestine, where foreign rule was accepted less easily. By the first century CE, Judaism was in a very strong position in the Roman empire. One-tenth of the whole empire was Jewish: in Philo’s Alexandria, forty percent of the population were Jews. People in the Roman empire were searching for new religious solutions; monotheistic ideas were in the air, and local gods were increasingly seen as mere manifestations of a more encompassing divinity. The Romans were drawn to the high moral character of Judaism. Those who were understandably reluctant to be circumcised and observe the whole Torah often became honorary members of the synagogues, known as the “Godfearers.” They were on the increase: it has even been suggested that one of the Flavian emperors might have converted to Judaism, as Constantine would later convert to Christianity. In Palestine, however, a group of political zealots fiercely opposed Roman rule. In 66 CE they orchestrated a rebellion against Rome and, incredibly, managed to hold the Roman armies at bay for four years. The authorities feared that the rebellion would spread to the Jews of the diaspora and were forced to crush it mercilessly. In 70 CE the armies of the new emperor Vespasian finally conquered Jerusalem, burned the Temple to the ground and made the city a Roman city called Aelia Capitolana. Yet again the Jews were forced into exile.

圣殿的损毁是新犹太教的灵感之源，这无疑是巨大的悲痛。但事后看来，巴勒斯坦的犹太人——他们往往比散居各地的希腊化犹太人更为保守——似乎早已为这场灾难做好了准备。圣地涌现出各种教派，它们以不同的方式与耶路撒冷圣殿决裂。艾赛尼派和昆兰派认为圣殿已经变得贪婪腐败，他们选择隐居，过着与世隔绝的社群生活，例如死海附近的修道院式社群。他们相信自己正在建造一座新的圣殿，一座非人手所造的圣殿。他们的圣殿将是精神的殿堂；他们不再进行传统的动物献祭，而是通过洗礼和集体用餐来洁净自身，寻求罪孽的赦免。上帝将居住在充满爱的兄弟情谊之中，而非一座石砌的圣殿里。

The loss of the Temple, which had been the inspiration of the new Judaism, was a great grief, but with hindsight it seems that the Jews of Palestine, who were often more conservative than the Hellenized Jews of the diaspora, had already prepared themselves for the catastrophe. Various sects had sprung up in the Holy Land which had in different ways dissociated themselves from the Jerusalem Temple. The Essenes and the Qumran sect believed that the Temple had become venal and corrupt; they had withdrawn to live in separate communities, such as the monastic-style community beside the Dead Sea. They believed that they were building a new Temple, not made with hands. Theirs would be a Temple of the Spirit; instead of the old animal sacrifices, they purified themselves and sought forgiveness of sins by baptismal ceremonies and communal meals. God would live in a loving brotherhood, not in a stone temple.

巴勒斯坦所有犹太人中最具进步精神的是法利赛人，他们认为艾赛尼派的解决方案过于精英主义。在新约圣经中，法利赛人被描绘成粉饰的坟墓和赤裸裸的伪君子。这源于公元一世纪论战的歪曲。法利赛人是充满灵性的犹太人。他们相信整个以色列都被呼召成为一个圣洁的祭司国度。上帝既可以临在于最简陋的家中，也可以临在于圣殿。因此，他们像正式的祭司阶层一样生活，在家中遵守原本只适用于圣殿的特殊洁净律法。他们坚持在洁净的状态下进餐，因为他们相信每个犹太人的餐桌都如同圣殿中上帝的祭坛。他们在日常生活的每一个细节中都培养对上帝临在的感知。犹太人现在可以直接接近上帝，无需祭司阶层和繁复的仪式。他们可以通过善待邻舍的行为来赎罪；慈善是《托拉》中最重要的诫命；当两三个犹太人一起学习《托拉》时，上帝就在他们中间。在本世纪初，出现了两个相互竞争的学派：一个由长老沙迈领导，更为严苛；另一个由伟大的长老希勒尔领导，后来成为最受欢迎的法利赛派。据说有一天，一个异教徒找到希勒尔，告诉他，如果希勒尔老师能让他单腿站立，背诵整部《托拉》，他就愿意皈依犹太教。希勒尔回答说：“己所不欲，勿施于人。这就是《托拉》的全部精髓：去学习它吧。” ⁷⁷

The most progressive of all the Jews of Palestine were the Pharisees, who found the solution of the Essenes too elitist. In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests. God could be present in the humblest home as well as in the Temple. Consequently, they lived like the official priestly caste, observing the special laws of purity that applied only to the Temple in their own homes. They insisted on eating their meals in a state of ritual purity because they believed that the table of every single Jew was like God’s altar in the Temple. They cultivated a sense of God’s presence in the smallest detail of daily life. Jews could now approach him directly without the mediation of a priestly caste and an elaborate ritual. They could atone for their sins by acts of loving-kindness to their neighbor; charity was the most important mitzvah in the Torah; when two or three Jews studied the Torah together, God was in their midst. During the early years of the century, two rival schools had emerged: one led by Shammai the Elder, which was more rigorous, and the other led by the great Rabbi Hillel the Elder, which became by far the most popular Pharisaic party. There is a story that one day a pagan had approached Hillel and told him that he would be willing to convert to Judaism if the Master could recite the whole of the Torah to him while he stood on one leg. Hillel replied: “Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the whole of the Torah: go and learn it.”⁷⁷

到了灾难性的公元 70 年，法利赛人已经成为巴勒斯坦犹太教中最受尊敬和最重要的教派；他们已经向他们的人民表明，他们不需要圣殿来敬拜上帝，正如这个著名的故事所表明的那样：

By the disastrous year 70, the Pharisees had become the most respected and important sect of Palestinian Judaism; they had already shown their people that they did not need a Temple to worship God, as this famous story shows:

据说，耶路撒冷陷落后，拉比约哈南被装在棺材里偷运出了燃烧的城市。他曾反对……犹太人发动叛乱，认为犹太人没有国家会更好。罗马人允许他在耶路撒冷以西的雅布内建立一个自治的法利赛社群。类似的社群也在巴勒斯坦和巴比伦建立，并保持着密切联系。这些社群涌现出被称为“塔纳伊姆”（Tannaim）的学者，其中包括像约哈南拉比本人、神秘主义者阿基瓦拉比和以实玛利拉比这样的拉比英雄：他们编纂了《密释纳》（Mishnah），这部口传律法的法典使摩西律法与时俱进。之后，另一批被称为“阿摩拉伊姆”（Amoraim）的学者开始对《密释纳》进行注释，并编纂了统称为《塔木德》（Talmud）的论著。事实上，当时已经编纂了两部《塔木德》：一部是四世纪末完成的《耶路撒冷塔木德》，另一部是五世纪末才完成的《巴比伦塔木德》，后者被认为更具权威性。随着一代又一代学者轮番对《塔木德》及其前人的诠释进行评注，这一过程得以延续。这种律法思考并非如外人想象的那般枯燥乏味。它实际上是对上帝圣言——新的至圣所——的无尽冥想；每一层诠释都象征着一座新圣殿的城墙和庭院，将上帝的临在彰显于祂的子民之中。

It is said that after the conquest of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yohannan had been smuggled out of the burning city in a coffin. He had been opposed to the Jewish revolt and thought that the Jews would be better off without a state. The Romans allowed him to found a self-governing Pharisaic community at Jabneh, to the west of Jerusalem. Similar communities were founded in Palestine and Babylonia, which maintained close links. These communities produced the scholars known as the tannaim, including rabbinic heroes like Rabbi Yohannan himself, Rabbi Akiva the mystic and Rabbi Ishmael: they compiled the Mishnah, the codification of an oral law which brought the Mosaic law up to date. Next a new set of scholars, known as the amoraim, began a commentary on the Mishnah and produced the treatises known collectively as the Talmud. In fact two Talmuds had been compiled; the Jerusalem Talmud, which was completed by the end of the fourth century, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is considered the more authoritative and which was not completed until the end of the fifth century. The process continued as each generation of scholars began to comment in their turn on the Talmud and the exegesis of their predecessors. This legal contemplation is not as desiccated as outsiders tend to imagine. It was an endless meditation on the Word of God, the new Holy of Holies; each layer of exegesis represented the walls and courts of a new Temple, enshrining the presence of God among his people.

耶和华一直是一位超越一切的神，祂从天上和天外指引着人类。拉比们则将祂与人类紧密相连，融入生活的方方面面。在圣殿被毁、又一次流亡的苦难经历之后，犹太人需要一位与他们同在的神。拉比们并没有构建任何关于神的正式教义。相反，他们体验到神的存在近乎触手可及。他们的灵性被描述为一种“正常的神秘主义”状态。 ⁷⁹在《塔木德》最早的篇章中，人们通过神秘的自然现象来体验神。拉比们谈到圣灵，祂曾掌管创造和圣殿的建造，祂的存在体现在呼啸的狂风或熊熊燃烧的烈火中。也有人从钟声或尖锐的敲击声中听到祂的存在。例如，有一天，约哈南拉比正在讨论以西结关于战车的异象，这时天降烈火，天使们站在附近：一个来自天上的声音证实，拉比肩负着来自上帝的特殊使命^。80

Yahweh had always been a transcendent deity, who directed human beings from above and without. The Rabbis made him intimately present within mankind and the smallest details of life. After the loss of the Temple and the harrowing experience of yet another exile, the Jews needed a God in their midst. The Rabbis did not construct any formal doctrines about God. Instead, they experienced him as an almost tangible presence. Their spirituality has been described as a state of “normal mysticism.”⁷⁹ In the very earliest passages of the Talmud, God was experienced in mysterious physical phenomena. The Rabbis spoke about the Holy Spirit, which had brooded over creation and the building of the sanctuary, making its presence felt in a rushing wind or a blazing fire. Others heard it in the clanging of a bell or a sharp knocking sound. One day, for example, Rabbi Yohannan had been sitting discussing Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, when a fire descended from heaven and angels stood nearby: a voice from heaven confirmed that the Rabbi had a special mission from God.⁸⁰

他们对上帝的感知如此强烈，以至于任何官方的、客观的教义都显得格格不入。拉比们经常认为，在西奈山上，每个站在山脚下的以色列人都以不同的方式体验了上帝。上帝仿佛“根据每个人的理解力”调整自身，以适应每个人。正如一位拉比所说：“上帝并非以压迫的方式降临于人，而是与人接受他的能力相称。”^{这一重要的拉比洞见意味着，上帝不能被用公式化的方式描述，仿佛他对每个人都是一样的：他本质上是一种主观体验。每个人都会以不同的方式体验“上帝”的真实存在，以满足其自身性情的需求。拉比}们坚持认为，每位先知对上帝的体验都各不相同，因为他们的个性影响了他们对神性的理解。我们将看到，其他一神论者也会发展出非常相似的观点。时至今日，关于上帝的神学观念在犹太教中仍然是私人事务，并不受教会的强制执行。

So strong was their sense of presence that any official, objective doctrines would have been quite out of place. The Rabbis frequently suggested that on Mount Sinai, each one of the Israelites who had been standing at the foot of the mountain had experienced God in a different way. God had, as it were, adapted himself to each person “according to the comprehension of each.”⁸¹ As one Rabbi put it, “God does not come to man oppressively but commensurately with a man’s power of receiving him.”⁸² This very important rabbinic insight meant that God could not be described in a formula as though he were the same for everybody: he was an essentially subjective experience. Each individual would experience the reality of “God” in a different way to answer the needs of his or her own particular temperament. Each one of the prophets had experienced God differently, the Rabbis insisted, because his personality had influenced his conception of the divine. We shall see that other monotheists would develop a very similar notion. To this day, theological ideas about God are private matters in Judaism and are not enforced by the establishment.

任何官方教义都会限制上帝本质的奥秘。拉比们指出，上帝是完全不可理解的。就连摩西也无法洞悉上帝的奥秘：经过长时间的研究，大卫王也承认，试图理解上帝是徒劳的，因为他远超人类的理解能力。83^犹太人甚至被禁止念诵上帝的名字，这有力地提醒我们，任何试图表达上帝的尝试都注定是徒劳的：上帝的名字写作YHWH，在任何经文中都不能念诵。我们可以欣赏上帝在自然界中的作为，但正如胡纳拉比所说，这仅仅让我们瞥见了整个现实的微不足道的一角：“人无法理解雷霆、飓风、暴风雨的意义，也无法理解宇宙的秩序，甚至无法理解自身的本性；那么，他又怎能夸耀自己能够理解万王之王的行事方式呢？” ⁸⁴上帝概念的全部意义在于激发人们对生命奥秘和奇妙的感知，而不是寻找现成的答案。拉比们甚至警告以色列人在祷告中不要过于频繁地赞美上帝，因为他们的言语必然会有缺陷^。85

Any official doctrine would limit the essential mystery of God. The Rabbis pointed out that he was utterly incomprehensible. Not even Moses had been able to penetrate the mystery of God: after lengthy research, King David had admitted that it was futile to try to understand him, because he was too much for the human mind.⁸³ Jews were even forbidden to pronounce his name, a powerful reminder that any attempt to express him was bound to be inadequate: the divine name was written YHWH and not pronounced in any reading of the scripture. We could admire God’s deeds in nature but, as Rabbi Huna said, this only gave us an infinitesimal glimpse of the whole reality: “Man cannot conceive the meaning of thunder, hurricane, storm, the order of the universe, his own nature; how then can he boast of being able to understand the ways of the King of all Kings?”⁸⁴ The whole point of the idea of God was to encourage a sense of the mystery and wonder of life, not to find neat solutions. The Rabbis even warned the Israelites against praising God too frequently in their prayers, because their words were bound to be defective.⁸⁵

这位超凡脱俗、不可理解的存在与世界有何关联？拉比们用一个悖论来表达他们的理解：“上帝是世界的居所，但世界并非上帝的居所。” ⁸⁶上帝仿佛环绕着世界，但他并不像凡人那样生活在其中。他们常说，上帝充满世界，如同灵魂充满肉体：他赋予世界意义，却又超越世界。他们还说，上帝如同骑马的人：骑在马上时，骑手依赖于马匹，但他凌驾于马匹之上，掌控着缰绳。这些都只是比喻，必然是不完整的：它们是对一个巨大而难以定义的“存在”的想象性描绘。我们赖以生存、行动和存在的，正是这世界。当他们谈到上帝在世上的临在时，他们像圣经作者一样谨慎，力求区分上帝允许我们看见的痕迹与那不可接近的更伟大的神圣奥秘。他们喜爱耶和华的“荣耀”（kavod）和圣灵的意象，这些意象不断提醒他们，我们所经历的上帝并不等同于神圣现实的本质。

How did this transcendent and incomprehensible being relate to the world? The Rabbis expressed their sense of this in a paradox: “God is the place of the world, but the world is not his place:”⁸⁶ God enveloped and encircled the world, as it were, but he did not live in it as mere creatures did. In another of their favorite images, they used to say that God filled the world as the soul fills the body: it informs but transcends it. Again, they said that God was like the rider of a horse: while he is on the horse, the rider depends upon the animal, but he is superior to it and has control of the reins. These were only images and, inevitably, inadequate: they were imaginative depictions of a huge and indefinable “something” in which we live and move and have our being. When they spoke of God’s presence on earth, they were as careful as the biblical writers to distinguish those traces of God that he allows us to see from the greater divine mystery which is inaccessible. They liked the images of the “glory” (kavod) of YHWH and of the Holy Spirit, which were constant reminders that the God that we experience does not correspond to the essence of the divine reality.

他们最常用来指代上帝的同义词之一是舍金娜（Shekinah），这个词源于希伯来语“shakan”，意为“居住”或“安营扎寨”。如今圣殿已毁，曾陪伴以色列人在旷野漂流的上帝形象，象征着上帝的平易近人。有人说，即使圣殿已成废墟，与祂的子民同在地上的舍金娜仍然居住在圣殿山上。另一些拉比则认为，圣殿的毁灭使舍金娜从耶路撒冷解脱出来，得以居住在世界其他地方。87如同神圣的“荣耀”或圣灵一样，舍金娜并非被视为一个独立的神祇^，而是上帝在世间的临在。拉比们回顾他们民族的历史，发现舍金娜始终伴随着他们：

One of their favorite synonyms for God was the Shekinah, which derived from the Hebrew shakan, to dwell with or to pitch one’s tent. Now that the Temple was gone, the image of God who had accompanied the Israelites on their wanderings in the wilderness suggested the accessibility of God. Some said that the Shekinah, who dwelt with his people on earth, still lived on the Temple Mount, even though the Temple was in ruins. Other Rabbis argued that the destruction of the Temple had freed the Shekinah from Jerusalem and enabled it to inhabit the rest of the world.⁸⁷ Like the divine “glory” or the Holy Spirit, the Shekinah was not conceived as a separate divine being but as the presence of God on earth. The Rabbis looked back on the history of their people and saw that it had always accompanied them:

以色列与其上帝之间的联系如此紧密，以至于过去上帝救赎他们时，以色列人常常对上帝说：“你救赎了你自己。” ⁸⁹拉比们以他们独特的犹太方式，发展出上帝与自我认同的观念，印度教徒称之为阿特曼。

The connection between Israel and its God was so strong that, when he had redeemed them in the past, the Israelites used to tell God: “Thou hast redeemed thyself.”⁸⁹ In their own distinctly Jewish way, the Rabbis were developing that sense of God as identified with the self, which the Hindus had called Atman.

舍金娜的形象帮助流亡者无论身处何地都能感受到上帝的临在。拉比们说，舍金娜在散居各地的犹太会堂间穿梭；也有人说，它伫立在会堂门口，祝福犹太人前往经学院的每一步；当犹太人在会堂里一起诵读《示玛篇^​​》时，舍金娜也伫立在会堂门口。早期基督徒，也就是以色列人，在他们的拉比鼓励下，要将自己视为一个“身心灵合一”的统一社群。 ⁹¹这个社群就是新的圣殿，供奉着内在的上帝：因此，当他们进入会堂，以“虔诚、同声、同意、同音”的方式齐声诵读《示玛篇​​》时，上帝就临在于他们之中。但他憎恶社群中任何不和谐之处，便返回天庭，在那里，天使们“同声、同曲”地吟唱着赞美上帝的颂歌。 ⁹²只有当以色列人与以色列人之间的低级联合完全实现时，上帝与以色列人之间更高层次的联合才能存在：拉比们不断地告诉他们，当一群犹太人一起学习《托拉》时，神圣的舍金纳（Shekinah）就临在于他们之中。 ⁹³

The image of the Shekinah helped the exiles to cultivate a sense of God’s presence wherever they were. The Rabbis spoke of the Shekinah skipping from one synagogue of the diaspora to another; others said that it stood at the door of the synagogue, blessing each step that a Jew took on his way to the House of Studies; the Shekinah also stood at the door of the synagogue when the Jews recited the Shema there together.⁹⁰ Like the early Christians, the Israelites were encouraged by their Rabbis to see themselves as a united community with “one body and one soul.”⁹¹ The community was the new Temple, enshrining the immanent God: thus when they entered the synagogue and recited the Shema in perfect unison “with devotion, with one voice, one mind and one tone,” God was present among them. But he hated any lack of harmony in the community and returned to heaven, where the angels chanted the divine praises “with one voice and one melody.”⁹² The higher union of God and Israel could only exist when the lower union of Israelite with Israelite was complete: constantly, the Rabbis told them that when a group of Jews studied the Torah together, the Shekinah sat among them.⁹³

在流亡中，犹太人感受到了周围世界的严酷；这种切身的感受让他们感到被一位仁慈的上帝所环绕。当他们按照申命记的规定，将经文匣（tfillin）系在手上和额头上，佩戴仪式性的流苏（tzitzit），并将装有《示玛篇》经文的门柱经文匣（mezuzah）钉在门上时，他们不应该试图解释这些晦涩而独特的习俗。那样会限制它们的价值。相反，他们应该让这些诫命的履行促使他们意识到上帝无所不在的爱：“以色列蒙爱！圣经用诫命环绕着他：头上和手臂上的经文匣，门上的门柱经文匣，衣服上的流苏。” ⁹⁴这些诫命就像国王送给妻子的珠​​宝，使她在他眼中更加美丽。这并非易事。 《塔木德》表明，有些人质疑上帝在如此黑暗的世界中是否真的发挥了作用。95^拉比们的灵性在犹太教中成为一种规范，不仅在逃离耶路撒冷的犹太人中如此，在一直生活在流散中的犹太人中也是如此。这并非因为它建立在坚实的理论基础之上：律法的许多实践在逻辑上并不合理。拉比们的宗教之所以被接受，是因为它行之有效。拉比们的远见卓识使他们的族人免于陷入绝望。

In exile, the Jews felt the harshness of the surrounding world; this sense of presence helped them to feel enveloped by a benevolent God. When they bound their phylacteries (tfillin) to their hands and foreheads, wore ritual fringes (tzitzit) and nailed the mezuzah containing the words of the Shema over their doors, as Deuteronomy prescribed, they should not try to explain these obscure and peculiar practices. That would limit their value. Instead they should allow the performance of these mitzvot to nudge them into an awareness of God’s enveloping love; “Israel is beloved! The Bible surrounds him with mitzvot: tfillin on the head and arm, a mezuzah on the door, tzitzit on their clothes.”⁹⁴ They were like the gifts of jewels that a king gave to his wife to make her more beautiful to him. It was not easy. The Talmud shows that some people were wondering whether God made much difference in such a dark world.⁹⁵ The spirituality of the Rabbis became normative in Judaism, not merely among those who had fled Jerusalem but among Jews who had always lived in the diaspora. This was not because it was based on a sound theoretical foundation: many of the practices of the Law made no logical sense. The religion of the Rabbis was accepted because it worked. The vision of the Rabbis had prevented their people from falling into despair.

然而，这种灵性修行仅限于男性，因为女性无需——因此也不被允许——成为拉比、学习《托拉》或在犹太会堂祈祷。上帝的宗教正变得像当时的大多数其他意识形态一样父权制化。女性的角色是维护家庭的礼仪纯洁。犹太人长期以来通过将各种物品分开来圣化造物，本着这种精神，女性被置于与男性不同的领域，就像她们在厨房里要将牛奶和肉类分开一样。实际上，这意味着她们被视为低人一等。尽管拉比们……教义教导女性蒙受上帝的祝福，男性则被要求在晨祷中感谢上帝没有让他们成为外邦人、奴隶或女人。然而，婚姻被视为神圣的职责，家庭生活也被视为神圣的。拉比们在律法中强调了婚姻的神圣性，而这些律法常常被误解。月经期间禁止性交，并非因为女性被视为肮脏或令人厌恶。禁欲期的目的是为了防止男性将妻子视为理所当然：“因为男性可能会对妻子过于亲近，从而对她感到厌恶，所以律法规定，妻子在月经结束后七天内应处于禁欲状态（ niddah），这样她之后在男性心中才会像新婚之日那样被深爱。” ⁹⁶在节日前往犹太会堂之前，男性被要求进行沐浴，这并非因为他被认为不洁，而是为了使自己更加圣洁，以更好地参与神圣的宗教仪式。正是本着这种精神，妇女被要求在月经结束后进行沐浴，以预备自己迎接接下来神圣的性爱：与丈夫的性关系。性爱可以如此神圣的观念与基督教格格不入，因为基督教有时认为性和上帝是相互矛盾的。诚然，后来的犹太人常常对这些拉比的指示做出负面解读，但拉比们本身并没有宣扬一种阴郁、苦行、否定生命的灵性。

This type of spirituality was for men only, however, since women were not required—and therefore not permitted—to become Rabbis, to study Torah or to pray in the synagogue. The religion of God was becoming as patriarchal as most of the other ideologies of the period. The woman’s role was to maintain the ritual purity of the home. Jews had long sanctified creation by separating its various items, and in this spirit women were relegated to a separate sphere from their menfolk, just as they were to keep milk separate from meat in their kitchens. In practice, this meant that they were regarded as inferior. Even though the Rabbis taught that women were blessed by God, men were commanded to thank God during the morning prayer for not making them Gentiles, slaves or women. Yet marriage was regarded as a sacred duty and family life was holy. The Rabbis stressed its sanctity in legislation that has often been misunderstood. When sexual intercourse was forbidden during menstruation, this was not because a woman was to be regarded as dirty or disgusting. The period of abstinence was designed to prevent a man from taking his wife for granted: “Because a man may become overly familiar with his wife, and thus repelled by her, the Torah says that she should be a niddah [sexually unavailable] for seven days [after menses] so that she will be as beloved to him [afterward] as on the day of marriage.”⁹⁶ Before going to the synagogue on a festival day, a man was commanded to take a ritual bath, not because he was unclean in any simplistic way but to make himself more holy for the sacred divine service. It is in this spirit that a woman was commanded to take a ritual bath after the menstrual period, to prepare herself for the holiness of what came next: sexual relations with her husband. The idea that sex could be holy in this way would be alien to Christianity, which would sometimes see sex and God as mutually incompatible. True, later Jews often gave a negative interpretation to these rabbinic directives, but the Rabbis themselves did not preach a lugubrious, ascetic, life-denying spirituality.

相反，他们坚持认为犹太人有义务保持健康和快乐。他们经常描绘圣经人物，如雅各、大卫或以斯帖，在生病或不快乐时，圣灵“离开”或“抛弃”他们。97^有时，当他们感到圣灵离开时，他们会引用诗篇22篇：“我的神，我的神，你为什么离弃我？” 这引出了一个有趣的问题：耶稣在十字架上引用这些话时，他那神秘的呼喊究竟有何意义？拉比们教导说，上帝不希望男人和女人受苦。身体应该受到尊重和呵护，因为它是按照上帝的形象创造的：甚至拒绝诸如酒或性之类的享乐也可能是一种罪过，因为上帝赐予人类是为了让他们享受。上帝不在苦难和苦行之中。当他们敦促人们以实际的方式“拥有”圣灵时，从某种意义上说，他们是在要求人们为自己创造一个上帝的形象。他们教导说，很难界定上帝的作为始于何处，人类的作为止于何处。先知们总是通过将自己的洞见归于上帝，使上帝在世间显现。如今，人们认为拉比们从事着一项既是人之所为又是神之所为的工作。当他们制定新的律法时，这些律法既被视为上帝的旨意，也被视为他们自己的旨意。通过增加世间律法的数量，他们扩展了上帝的旨意。他们在世间的存在使世界更加高效。他们自身也被尊为律法的化身；由于他们精通律法，他们比任何人都更“像神” ^。98

On the contrary, they insisted that Jews had a duty to keep well and happy. They frequently depict the Holy Spirit “leaving” or “abandoning” such biblical characters as Jacob, David or Esther when they were sick or unhappy.⁹⁷ Sometimes they made them quote Psalm 22 when they felt the Spirit leave them: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” This raises an interesting question about Jesus’ mysterious cry from the cross, when he quoted these words. The Rabbis taught that God did not want men and women to suffer. The body should be honored and cared for, since it was in the image of God: it could even be sinful to avoid such pleasures as wine or sex, since God had provided them for man’s enjoyment. God was not to be found in suffering and asceticism. When they urged their people to practical ways of “possessing” the Holy Spirit, they were in one sense asking them to create their own image of God for themselves. They taught that it was not easy to say where God’s work began and man’s ended. The prophets had always made God visible on earth by attributing their own insights to him. Now the Rabbis were seen to be engaged in a task that was at once human and divine. When they formulated new legislation, it was seen both as God’s and as their own. By increasing the amount of Torah in the world, they were extending his presence in the world and making it more effective. They themselves came to be revered as the incarnations of Torah; they were more “like God” than anybody else because of their expertise in the Law.⁹⁸

这种内在的神性观念帮助犹太人视人性为神圣。阿基瓦拉比教导说，“爱人如己”这条诫命是“托拉的伟大原则”。99^冒犯他人即是对上帝本身的否定，因为上帝按照自己的形象创造了男人和女人。这等同于无神论，是对上帝的亵渎。因此，谋杀是最严重的罪行，因为它是一种亵渎神明的行为：“圣经教导我们，凡流人血的，都被视为玷污了上帝的形象。” ¹⁰⁰服务他人是效法上帝的行为：它再现了上帝的仁慈和怜悯。因为所有人都是按照上帝的形象创造的，所以人人平等：即使是大祭司，如果他伤害了他人，也应该受到鞭打，因为这等同于否认上帝的存在。¹⁰¹上帝创造了亚当，一个男人，以此教导我们，凡杀害一个人的生命，都将受到如同毁灭整个世界般的惩罚；同样，拯救一个生命就如同救赎整个世界。102^这不仅是一种崇高的情怀，更是一项基本的法律原则：这意味着，例如在大屠杀中，任何人都不能为了一个群体而被牺牲。羞辱任何人，即使是非犹太人或奴隶，都是最严重的罪行之一，因为它等同于谋杀，是对上帝形象的亵渎。103自由权至关重要：在整部拉比^文献中，几乎找不到任何关于监禁的记载，因为只有上帝才能限制人的自由。散布关于某人的丑闻等同于否认上帝的存在。104^犹太人不应将上帝视为高高在上的“老大哥”，监视他们的一举一动；相反，他们的目标是在每个人的内心培养一种敬畏上帝的意识，使我们与他人的交往成为神圣的相遇。

This sense of an immanent God helped Jews to see humanity as sacred. Rabbi Akiva taught that the mitzvah “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was “the great principle of Torah.”⁹⁹ Offenses against a fellow human being were a denial of God himself, who had made men and women in his image. It was tantamount to atheism, a blasphemous attempt to ignore God. Thus murder was the greatest of all crimes because it was a sacrilege: “Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image.”¹⁰⁰ Serving another human being was an act of imitatio dei: it reproduced God’s benevolence and compassion. Because all were created in God’s image, all were equal: even the High Priest should be beaten if he injured his fellow man, because it was tantamount to denying the existence of God.¹⁰¹ God created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world; similarly to save a life was to redeem the whole world.¹⁰² This was not just a lofty sentiment but a basic legal principle: it meant that no one individual could be sacrificed for the sake of a group during a pogrom, for example. To humiliate anybody, even a goy or a slave, was one of the most serious offenses, because it was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious denial of God’s image.¹⁰³ The right to liberty was crucial: it is difficult to find a single reference to imprisonment in the whole of rabbinic literature, because only God can curtail the freedom of a human being. Spreading scandal about somebody was tantamount to denying the existence of God.¹⁰⁴ Jews were not to think of God as a Big Brother, watching their every move from above; instead they were to cultivate a sense of God within each human being so that our dealings with others became sacred encounters.

动物们能够毫不费力地顺应天性，但人类似乎很难做到完全的人性。以色列的上帝有时似乎鼓励着一种极其邪恶和不人道的残忍行为。但几个世纪以来，耶和华逐渐演变成一种理念，能够帮助人们培养对同胞的同情和尊重，而这正是轴心时代宗教的标志。拉比们的理念与第二种神灵宗教的理念非常接近，后者也源于同样的传统。

Animals have no difficulty in living up to their nature, but men and women seem to find it hard to be fully human. The God of Israel had sometimes seemed to encourage a most unholy and inhumane cruelty. But over the centuries Yahweh had become an idea that could help people to cultivate a compassion and respect for their fellow human beings, which had always been a hallmark of the religions of the Axial Age. The ideals of the Rabbis were close to the second of the God-religions, which had its roots in exactly the same tradition.

3

外邦人的光

3

A Light to the Gentiles

一个就在斐洛在亚历山大阐述他柏拉图式的犹太教，希勒尔和沙迈在耶路撒冷争论不休的同时，一位极具魅力的信仰治疗师在巴勒斯坦北部开始了传道生涯。我们对耶稣知之甚少。第一部完整记载他生平的著作是《马可福音》，这部福音书直到公元70年左右才写成，也就是在他去世约40年后。到那时，历史事实已被神话元素所掩盖，这些神话元素表达了耶稣对他的追随者而言所具有的意义。《马可福音》主要传达的正是这种意义，而非对耶稣的可靠而直接的描述。早期基督徒视他为新的摩西、新的约书亚，新以色列的奠基人。如同佛陀一样，耶稣似乎概括了许多同时代人最深切的渴望，并赋予了几个世纪以来一直困扰着犹太人的梦想以现实意义。在他生前，巴勒斯坦的许多犹太人都相信他是弥赛亚：他骑马进入耶路撒冷，被尊称为大卫之子，但仅仅几天后，他就被罗马人以极其痛苦的十字架刑罚处死。尽管弥赛亚像普通罪犯一样死去，这令人震惊，但他的门徒却不愿相信他们对他信仰的错付了。有传言说他已经复活。有人说，在他被钉十字架三天后，人们发现他的坟墓空了；还有人说在异象中见过他，甚至有一次，五百人同时看到了他。他的门徒相信他很快就会回来，建立弥赛亚的上帝之国。由于这种信仰并无异端之处，他们的教派被希勒尔的孙子、拉比迦玛列认可为真正的犹太教派。他是犹太教最伟大的塔纳伊姆之一。他的追随者每天都像虔诚的犹太人一样在圣殿敬拜。然而，最终，受耶稣的生平、死亡和复活所激励的新以色列，将成为一个外邦人的信仰群体，并逐渐发展出其独特的上帝观。

AT THE SAME TIME as Philo was expounding his Platonized Judaism in Alexandria and Hillel and Shammai were arguing in Jerusalem, a charismatic faith healer began his own career in the north of Palestine. We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St. Mark’s Gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers. It is this meaning that St. Mark primarily conveys rather than a reliable straightforward portrayal. The first Christians saw him as a new Moses, a new Joshua, the founder of a new Israel. Like the Buddha, Jesus seemed to encapsulate some of the deepest aspirations of many of his contemporaries and to give substance to dreams that had haunted the Jewish people for centuries. During his lifetime, many Jews in Palestine had believed that he was the Messiah: he had ridden into Jerusalem and been hailed as the Son of David, but, only a few days later, he was put to death by the agonizing Roman punishment of crucifixion. Yet despite the scandal of a Messiah who had died like a common criminal, his disciples could not believe that their faith in him had been misplaced. There were rumors that he had risen from the dead. Some said that his tomb had been found empty three days after his crucifixion; others saw him in visions, and on one occasion 500 people saw him simultaneously. His disciples believed that he would soon return to inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom of God, and, since there was nothing heretical about such a belief, their sect was accepted as authentically Jewish by no less a person than Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel and one of the greatest of the tannaim. His followers worshipped in the Temple every day as fully observant Jews. Ultimately, however, the New Israel, inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, would become a Gentile faith, which would evolve its own distinctive conception of God.

耶稣大约在公元30年去世时，犹太人是虔诚的一神论者，因此没有人期望弥赛亚是神祇：他只是一个普通的、尽管享有特权的人。一些拉比认为，上帝从亘古就知晓他的名字和身份。从这个意义上讲，弥赛亚可以说在时间开始之前就“与上帝同在”，这与《箴言》和《德训篇》中神圣智慧的象征意义相同。犹太人期望弥赛亚，也就是受膏者，是大卫王的后裔。大卫王作为君王和精神领袖，在耶路撒冷建立了第一个独立的犹太王国。《诗篇》有时称大卫或弥赛亚为“上帝之子”，但这仅仅是一种表达他与耶和华亲密关系的方式。自从从巴比伦回归以来，没有人会认为耶和华真的有一个儿子，就像非犹太人所崇拜的那些可憎的神灵一样。

By the time of Jesus’ death in about 30 CE, the Jews were passionate monotheists, so nobody expected the Messiah to be a divine figure: he would simply be an ordinary, if privileged, human being. Some of the Rabbis suggested that his name and identity were known to God from all eternity. In that sense, therefore, the Messiah could be said to have been “with God” from before the beginning of time in the same symbolic way as the figure of divine Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus. Jews expected the Messiah, the anointed one, to be a descendant of King David, who, as king and spiritual leader, had founded the first independent Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem. The Psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah “the Son of God,” but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh. Nobody since the return from Babylon had imagined that Yahweh actually had a son, like the abominable deities of the goyim.

马可福音作为最早的福音书，通常被认为是最可靠的，它将耶稣描绘成一个完全正常的人，有兄弟姐妹。没有天使宣告他的降生，也没有天使在他的摇篮旁歌唱。在他婴幼儿时期或少年时期，他并没有表现出任何异于常人的特质。当他开始传道时，拿撒勒的居民们惊讶于这个当地木匠的儿子竟然如此神通广大。马可福音以耶稣的生平开篇。他最初似乎是施洗约翰的门徒，施洗约翰是一位四处游历的苦行僧，很可能是艾赛尼派的成员：约翰认为耶路撒冷的统治阶级腐败不堪，并发表了许多严厉的布道来抨击他们。他敦促民众悔改，并接受艾赛尼派在约旦河受洗的洁净仪式。路加福音暗示耶稣和约翰实际上是亲戚。耶稣曾从拿撒勒长途跋涉到犹太，接受约翰的洗礼。正如马可福音所记载：“他刚从水里上来，就看见天裂开了，圣灵仿佛鸽子降在他身上。又有声音从天上来说：‘你是我的爱子，我所喜悦的。’” ^¹施洗约翰立刻认出耶稣就是弥赛亚。接下来，我们听到的关于耶稣的事迹是，他开始在加利利各城镇乡村传道，宣告：“神的国已经来到了！” ^²

Mark’s Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announced his birth or sang over his crib. He had not been marked out during his infancy or adolescence as remarkable in any way. When he began to teach, his townsmen in Nazareth were astonished that the son of the local carpenter should have turned out to be such a prodigy. Mark begins his narrative with Jesus’ career. It seems that he may originally have been the disciple of one John the Baptist, a wandering ascetic who had probably been an Essene: John had regarded the Jerusalem establishment as hopelessly corrupt and preached excoriating sermons against it. He urged the populace to repent and to accept the Essene rite of purification by baptism in the River Jordan. Luke suggests that Jesus and John were actually related. Jesus had made the long journey from Nazareth to Judaea to be baptized by John. As Mark tells us: “No sooner had he come out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests upon you.’ ”¹ John the Baptist had immediately recognized Jesus as the Messiah. The next thing we hear about Jesus is that he began to preach in all the towns and villages of Galilee, announcing: “The Kingdom of God has arrived!”²

关于耶稣使命的确切性质，人们进行了诸多推测。福音书中似乎很少记载他的原话，而且福音书的许多内容都受到了他死后圣保罗所建立的教会后来发展的影响。尽管如此，仍有一些线索指向他本质上的犹太性质。有人指出，在加利利，信仰治疗师是常见的宗教人物：他们像耶稣一样是托钵僧，传道、治病、驱魔。同样像耶稣一样，这些加利利的圣人通常也拥有众多女门徒。另一些人则认为，耶稣很可能与希勒尔属于同一法利赛学派，正如保罗自称在皈依基督教之前是法利赛人，据说他曾拜师于拉比迦玛列门下。3耶稣的教导^无疑与法利赛人的主要信条相符，因为他也认为慈善和仁慈是诫命中最重要的。如同法利赛人一样，他虔诚地奉行律法，据说他宣扬的律法遵守比许多同时代的人更为严格。 ⁴他还教导了一种希勒尔黄金法则的变体，认为整部律法都可以概括为一句格言：你们愿意人怎样待你们，你们也要怎样待人。 ⁵在《马太福音》中，耶稣被描绘成对“文士和法利赛人”进行激烈且令人不齿的抨击，将他们描绘成毫无价值的伪君子。 ⁶ 这不仅是对事实的诽谤性歪曲，也是对他使命中本应体现的博爱精神的公然违背，而且他对法利赛人的严厉谴责几乎可以肯定并非出自他本人之口。例如，路加福音和使徒行传都对法利赛人给予了相当正面的评价；如果法利赛人真是耶稣的死敌，保罗也不会如此炫耀自己的法利赛背景。马太福音中反犹的倾向反映了公元80年代犹太人和基督徒之间的紧张关系。福音书中经常记载耶稣与法利赛人辩论，但这些讨论要么是友好的，要么可能反映了他对更为严苛的沙迈学派的异议。

There has been much speculation about the exact nature of Jesus’ mission. Very few of his actual words seem to have been recorded in the Gospels, and much of their material has been affected by later developments in the churches that were founded by St. Paul after his death. Nevertheless, there are clues that point to the essentially Jewish nature of his career. It has been pointed out that faith healers were familiar religious figures in Galilee: like Jesus, they were mendicants, who preached, healed the sick and exorcised demons. Like Jesus again, these Galilean holy men often had a large number of women disciples. Others argue that Jesus was probably a Pharisee of the same school as Hillel, just as Paul, who claimed to have been a Pharisee before his conversion to Christianity, was said to have sat at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel.³ Certainly Jesus’ teaching was in accord with major tenets of the Pharisees, since he also believed that charity and loving-kindness were the most important of the mitzvot. Like the Pharisees, he was devoted to the Torah and was said to have preached a more stringent observance than many of his contemporaries.⁴ He also taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule, when he argued that the whole of the Law could be summed up in the maxim: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.⁵ In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is made to utter violent and rather unedifying diatribes against “the Scribes and Pharisees,” presenting them as worthless hypocrites.⁶ Apart from this being a libelous distortion of the facts and a flagrant breach of the charity that was supposed to characterize his mission, the bitter denunciation of the Pharisees is almost certainly inauthentic. Luke, for example, gives the Pharisees a fairly good press in both his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul would scarcely have flaunted his Pharisaic background if the Pharisees really had been the sworn enemies of Jesus who had hounded him to death. The anti-Semitic tenor of Matthew’s Gospel reflects the tension between Jews and Christians during the 80s. The Gospels often show Jesus arguing with the Pharisees, but the discussion is either amicable or may reflect a disagreement with the more rigorous school of Shammai.

耶稣死后，他的追随者认定他是神。但这并非一蹴而就；正如我们将看到的，耶稣是道成肉身的神这一教义直到四世纪才最终确立。基督教关于道成肉身的信仰发展是一个渐进而复杂的过程。耶稣本人当然从未自称是神。在他受洗时，有来自天上的声音称他为神的儿子，但这很可能只是确认他是蒙爱的弥赛亚。这种来自天上的宣告并没有什么特别之处：拉比们经常经历他们称之为“巴特·科尔”（字面意思是“声音之女”）的启示，这种启示取代了更为直接的预言性启示。^{拉比约哈南}·本·扎凯就曾听到过这样的巴特·科尔，在圣灵以火的形式降临在他和他的门徒身上时，这印证了他自己的使命。耶稣自己也曾自称为“人子”。关于这个称谓一直存在诸多争议，但似乎最初的亚兰语短语（bar nasha）只是强调了人类的软弱和必死性。如果真是如此，耶稣似乎特意强调自己是一个脆弱的人，终有一天会受苦受难，最终走向死亡。

After his death, his followers decided that Jesus had been divine. This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the fourth century. The development of Christian belief in the Incarnation was a gradual, complex process. Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God. At his baptism he had been called the Son of God by a voice from heaven, but this was probably simply a confirmation that he was the beloved Messiah. There was nothing particularly unusual about such a proclamation from above: the Rabbis often experienced what they called a bat qol (literally, “Daughter of the Voice”), a form of inspiration that had replaced the more direct prophetic revelations.⁷ Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai had heard such a bat qol confirming his own mission on the occasion when the Holy Spirit had descended upon him and his disciples in the form of fire. Jesus himself used to call himself “the Son of Man.” There has been much controversy about this title, but it seems that the original Aramaic phrase (bar nasha) simply stressed the weakness and mortality of the human condition. If this is so, Jesus seems to have gone out of his way to emphasize that he was a frail human being who would one day suffer and die.

福音书告诉我们，上帝赋予了耶稣某些神圣的“能力”（dunamis），使他虽是凡人，却能行神迹，医治病人，赦免罪孽。因此，当人们亲眼目睹耶稣的作为时，便能真切地感受到上帝的形象。有一次，他的三个门徒声称比以往更清楚地看到了这一点。这个故事被记载在三部符类福音中，对后世的基督徒来说意义非凡。故事讲述耶稣带着彼得、雅各和约翰上了一座很高的山，这座山传统上被认为是加利利的他泊山。在那里，他在他们面前“变了形像”：“他的脸面明亮如日头，衣服洁白如光。”摩西和以利亚^分别代表律法和先知，突然出现在他身边，三人开始交谈。彼得惊愕不已，脱口而出，不知自己说了什么，说要建造三座帐幕来纪念这异象。一团明亮的云彩，如同降在西奈山上的云彩，笼罩了山顶，一个蝙蝠神（bat qol）宣告：“这是我的爱子，我所爱的；他蒙我恩宠。你们要听他的话。”^九个世纪后，当希腊基督徒思考这异象的意义时，他们认为神的“能力”透过耶稣被改变的人性彰显出来。

The Gospels tell us that God had given Jesus certain divine “powers” (dunamis), however, which enabled him, mere mortal though he was, to perform the God-like tasks of healing the sick and forgiving sins. When people saw Jesus in action, therefore, they had a living, breathing image of what God was like. On one occasion, three of his disciples claimed to have seen this more clearly than usual. The story has been preserved in all three of the Synoptic Gospels and would be very important to later generations of Christians. It tells us that Jesus had taken Peter, James and John up a very high mountain, which is traditionally identified with Mount Tabor in Galilee. There he was “transfigured” before them: “his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as the light.”⁸ Moses and Elijah, representing respectively the Law and the prophets, suddenly appeared beside him and the three conversed together. Peter was quite overcome and cried aloud, not knowing what he said, that they should build three tabernacles to commemorate the vision. A bright cloud, like that which had descended on Mount Sinai, covered the mountaintop and a bat qol declared: “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favor. Listen to him.”⁹ Centuries later, when Greek Christians pondered the meaning of this vision, they decided that the “powers” of God had shone through Jesus’ transfigured humanity.

他们还注意到，耶稣从未声称这些神圣的“能力”（或称“力量”）仅限于他一人。耶稣曾多次向门徒承诺，只要他们有“信心”，也能享有这些“能力”。当然，他所说的信心并非指接受正确的教义，而是指培养一种内在的顺服和对上帝的敞开之心。如果门徒毫无保留地向上帝敞开自己，他们就能做到他所能做的一切。与拉比们一样，耶稣并不认为圣灵只赐予特权阶层，而是赐予所有心怀善意的人：一些经文甚至暗示，耶稣也像一些拉比一样，相信即使是非犹太人也能领受圣灵。圣灵。如果他的门徒拥有“信心”，他们就能成就更大的事。他们不仅能够赦免罪孽、驱逐邪灵，还能将山投于海中。10他们会发现，他们脆弱的、必死的生命已被弥赛亚国度世界中临在并^运行的上帝的“能力”所改变。

They also noted that Jesus had never claimed that these divine “powers,” or dynameis, were confined to him alone. Again and again, Jesus had promised his disciples that if they had “faith” they would enjoy these “powers” too. By faith, of course, he did not mean adopting the correct theology but cultivating an inner attitude of surrender and openness to God. If his disciples laid themselves open to God without reserve, they would be able to do everything that he could do. Like the Rabbis, Jesus did not believe that the Spirit was just for a privileged elite but for all men of goodwill: some passages even suggest that, again like some of the Rabbis, Jesus believed that even the goyim could receive the Spirit. If his disciples had “faith,” they would be able to do even greater things. Not only would they be able to forgive sins and exorcise demons, but they would be able to hurl a mountain into the sea.¹⁰ They would discover that their frail, mortal lives had been transfigured by the “powers” of God that were present and active in the world of the Messianic Kingdom.

耶稣死后，门徒们仍然坚信耶稣以某种方式展现了上帝的形象。他们很早就开始向他祷告。圣保罗相信上帝的力量应该向非犹太人敞开，因此他在如今的土耳其、马其顿和希腊一带传扬福音。他坚信，即使非犹太人没有完全遵守摩西律法，他们也可以成为新以色列的成员。这冒犯了最初的门徒，他们希望保持一个更加纯粹的犹太教派，并在一次激烈的争论后与保罗决裂。然而，保罗的大部分皈依者要么是散居各地的犹太人，要么是敬畏上帝的人，因此新以色列仍然保持着浓厚的犹太传统。保罗从未称耶稣为“上帝”。他称他为“上帝之子”，这是犹太教意义上的称呼：他当然不认为耶稣是上帝的化身：耶稣只是拥有上帝的“能力”和“灵”，这体现了上帝在世上的作为，但不能等同于不可接近的神圣本质。毫不奇怪，在非犹太人的世界里，新基督徒并非总能把握这些微妙的区别，以至于最终，一个强调自身软弱、必死的人竟然被认为是神。耶稣道成肉身的教义一直令犹太人感到震惊，后来，穆斯林也认为这是亵渎神明的行为。这是一个晦涩难懂且充满危险的教义；基督徒常常对其进行粗浅的解读。然而，这种道成肉身的敬拜在宗教史上却是一个相当普遍的主题：我们将看到，甚至犹太教徒和穆斯林也发展出了一些惊人相似的神学体系。

After his death, the disciples could not abandon their faith that Jesus had somehow presented an image of God. From a very early date, they had begun to pray to him. St. Paul believed that the powers of God should be made accessible to the goyim and preached the Gospel in what is now Turkey, Macedonia and Greece. He was convinced that non-Jews could become members of the New Israel even though they did not observe the full Law of Moses. This offended the original group of disciples, who wanted to remain a more exclusively Jewish sect, and they broke with Paul after a passionate dispute. Most of Paul’s converts were either diaspora Jews or Godfearers, however, so the New Israel remained deeply Jewish. Paul never called Jesus “God.” He called him “the Son of God” in its Jewish sense: he certainly did not believe that Jesus had been the incarnation of God himself: he had simply possessed God’s “powers” and “Spirit,” which manifested God’s activity on earth and were not to be identified with the inaccessible divine essence. Not surprisingly, in the Gentile world the new Christians did not always retain the sense of these subtle distinctions, so that eventually a man who had stressed his weak, mortal humanity was believed to have been divine. The doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Jesus has always scandalized Jews, and, later, Muslims would also find it blasphemous. It is a difficult doctrine with certain dangers; Christians have often interpreted it crudely. Yet this type of Incarnational devotion has been a fairly constant theme in the history of religion: we shall see that even Jews and Muslims developed some strikingly similar theologies of their own.

我们可以通过简要考察几乎同一时期印度的一些发展，来理解耶稣神化这一惊人现象背后的宗教动因。在佛教和印度教中，都出现了对崇高存在（例如佛陀本人或化身为人的印度教神祇）的虔诚崇拜热潮。这种被称为“奉爱”（ bhakti）的个人虔诚，似乎表达了人类对人性化宗教的永恒渴望。这是一种全新的尝试，然而，在两种信仰中，它都被融入到宗教之中，而没有损害其核心原则。

We can see the religious impulse behind this startling divinization of Jesus by looking briefly at some developments in India at about the same time. In both Buddhism and Hinduism there had been a surge of devotion to exalted beings, such as the Buddha himself or Hindu gods which had appeared in human form. This kind of personal devotion, known as bhakti, expressed what seems to be a perennial human yearning for humanized religion. It was a completely new departure and yet, in both faiths, it was integrated into the religion without compromising essential priorities.

佛陀于公元前六世纪末涅槃后，人们自然想要留下他的纪念品，但他们觉得雕像……这并不合适，因为在涅槃中，他已不再以任何通常意义上的方式“存在”。然而，人们对佛陀的个人爱慕与日俱增，对佛陀觉悟人性的思考也变得如此强烈，以至于公元前一世纪，第一批佛像出现在印度西北部的犍陀罗和亚穆纳河畔的马图拉。这些佛像的力量和启发性赋予了它们在佛教灵性中的核心地位，尽管这种对超越自我的存在（即佛陀）的虔诚与乔达摩所宣扬的内在修行截然不同。所有宗教都在不断变化和发展。如果它们停滞不前，就会被淘汰。大多数佛教徒认为奉爱（bhakti）极其宝贵，并觉得它提醒他们一些濒临失传的基本真理。人们或许还记得，佛陀初证悟成佛时，曾一度想要将觉悟秘而不宣，但他对受苦受难的人类的慈悲心驱使他在接下来的四十年里弘扬佛法。然而到了公元前一世纪，那些闭关修行、试图独自证得涅槃的佛教僧侣似乎已经忘记了这一点。僧侣生活也成为了一种令人望而生畏的理想，许多人觉得这远远超出了他们的能力范围。公元一世纪，一种新型的佛教英雄出现了：菩萨。他们效仿佛陀的榜样，推迟了自己的涅槃，为了众生的福祉而牺牲自己。他们甘愿承受轮回之苦，以拯救受苦的人们。正如公元前一世纪末编纂的《般若波罗蜜多经》（智慧圆满的经藏）所阐述的那样，菩萨们……

After the Buddha had died at the end of the sixth century BCE, people naturally wanted a memento of him, yet they felt that a statue was inappropriate, since in nirvana he no longer “existed” in any normal sense. Yet personal love of the Buddha developed and the need to contemplate his enlightened humanity became so strong that in the first century BCE the first statues appeared at Gandhara in northwest India and Mathura on the Jumna River. The power and inspiration of such images gave them a central importance in Buddhist spirituality, even though this devotion to a being outside the self was very different from the interior discipline preached by Gautama. All religions change and develop. If they do not, they will become obsolete. The majority of Buddhists found bhakti extremely valuable and felt that it reminded them of some essential truths which were in danger of being lost. When the Buddha had first achieved enlightenment, it will be recalled that he had been tempted to keep it to himself, but his compassion for suffering humanity had compelled him to spend the next forty years preaching the Way. Yet by the first century BCE, Buddhist monks who were locked away in their monasteries trying to reach nirvana on their own seemed to have lost sight of this. The monastic was also a daunting ideal, which many felt to be quite beyond them. During the first century CE, a new kind of Buddhist hero emerged: the bodhisattva, who followed the Buddha’s example and put off his own nirvana, sacrificing himself for the sake of the people. He was ready to endure rebirth in order to rescue people in pain. As the Prajna-paramita Sutras (Sermons on the Perfection of Wisdom), which were compiled at the end of the first century BCE, explain, the bodhisattvas

此外，菩萨积累了无尽的功德，可以帮助那些灵性天赋较弱的人。向菩萨祈祷的人可以往生佛教宇宙论中的极乐世界，在那里更容易证得觉悟。

Further, the bodhisattva had acquired an infinite source of merit, which could help the less spiritually gifted. A person who prayed to a bodhisattva could be reborn into one of the paradises in the Buddhist cosmology, where conditions made the attainment of enlightenment easier.

这些文本强调，这些思想不应按字面意思理解。它们与世俗的逻辑或事件无关，而仅仅是某种更为深奥真理的象征。公元二世纪初公元1500年，空性派的创始人龙树菩萨运用悖论和辩证法，论证了常规概念语言的局限性。他坚持认为，终极真理只能通过禅修等精神训练，凭直觉领悟。甚至佛陀的教义也只是约定俗成的、人为构建的观念，根本无法准确传达他试图阐明的真理。接受这种哲学的佛教徒逐渐形成了一种信念：我们所经历的一切都是幻象——在西方，我们会称他们为唯心主义者。绝对，即万物的内在本质，是虚空，是无，在通常意义上并不存在。人们自然而然地将虚空等同于涅槃。既然像乔达摩·悉达多这样的佛陀已经证得涅槃，那么在某种难以言喻的方式中，他也达到了涅槃的境界，与绝对合一。因此，所有追求涅槃的人，实际上也是在寻求与佛陀合一。

The texts emphasize that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally. They had nothing to do with ordinary logic or events in this world, but were merely symbols of a more elusive truth. In the early second century CE, Nagarjuna, the philosopher who founded the Void School, used paradox and a dialectical method to demonstrate the inadequacy of normal conceptual language. The ultimate truths, he insisted, could only be grasped intuitively through the mental disciplines of meditation. Even the Buddha’s teachings were conventional, man-made ideas that did no justice to the reality he had tried to convey. Buddhists who adopted this philosophy developed a belief that everything we experience is an illusion: in the West, we would call them idealists. The Absolute, which is the inner essence of all things, is a void, a nothing, which has no existence in the normal sense. It was natural to identify the void with nirvana. Since a Buddha such as Gautama had attained nirvana, it followed that in some ineffable way he had become nirvana and was identical with the Absolute. Thus everybody who sought nirvana was also seeking identity with the Buddhas.

不难看出，这种对佛陀和菩萨的虔诚（bhakti）与基督教对耶稣的虔诚有相似之处。它也使更多人能够接触到宗教，正如保罗希望将犹太教介绍给非犹太人（goyim）一样。与此同时，印度教中也出现了类似的虔诚（bhakti）热潮，其中心是湿婆和毗湿奴这两位最重要的吠陀神祇。然而，民众的虔诚再次胜过了奥义书的哲学严谨。实际上，印度教徒发展出了一个三位一体的概念：梵天、湿婆和毗湿奴是同一个不可言喻的实在的三个象征或面向。

It is not difficult to see that this bhakti (devotion) to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas was similar to the Christian devotion to Jesus. It also made the faith accessible to more people, rather as Paul had wished to make Judaism available to the goyim. There had been a similar welling up of bhakti in Hinduism at the same time, which centred on the figures of Shiva and Vishnu, two of the most important Vedic deities. Yet again, popular devotion proved stronger than the philosophical austerity of the Upanishads. In effect, Hindus developed a Trinity: Brahman, Shiva and Vishnu were three symbols or aspects of a single, ineffable reality.

有时，从湿婆的视角来思考神的奥秘会更有帮助。湿婆是善与恶、生育与苦行的矛盾神祇，既是创造者又是毁灭者。在民间传说中，湿婆也是一位伟大的瑜伽士，因此他也启发信徒们通过冥想超越个人对神性的理解。毗湿奴通常更仁慈、更顽皮。他喜欢以各种化身或化身显现于世人面前。他最著名的化身之一是克里希那，克里希那出身贵族，却被抚养为牧牛人。民间传说喜爱他与牧牛女们的风流韵事，这些故事将神描绘成灵魂的爱人。然而，当毗湿奴在《薄伽梵歌》中以克里希那的形象出现在阿周那王子面前时，那却是一次令人恐惧的经历：

Sometimes it would be more helpful to contemplate the mystery of God under the aspect of Shiva, the paradoxical deity of good and evil, fertility and asceticism, who was both creator and destroyer. In popular legend, Shiva was also a great Yogi, so he also inspired his devotees to transcend personal concepts of divinity by means of meditation. Vishnu was usually kinder and more playful. He liked to show himself to mankind in various incarnations or avatars. One of his more famous personae was the character of Krishna, who had been born into a noble family but was brought up as a cowherd. Popular legend loved the stories of his dalliance with the cowgirls, which depicted God as the Lover of the Soul. Yet when Vishnu appears to Prince Arjuna as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, it is a terrifying experience:

万物皆以某种方式存在于克里希那的体内：他无始无终，他充满整个宇宙，囊括了所有可能的神祇：“咆哮的风暴之神、太阳之神、光明之神和祭祀之神。” ¹³他也是“人类不知疲倦的精神”，是人性的本质。 ¹⁴万物都奔向克里希那，如同河流奔涌向大海，如同飞蛾扑火。阿周那凝视着这令人敬畏的景象，只能颤抖不已，完全失去了方向感。

Everything is somehow present in the body of Krishna: he has no beginning or end, he fills space, and includes all possible deity: “Howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods and gods of ritual.”¹³ He is also “man’s tireless spirit,” the essence of humanity.¹⁴ All things rush toward Krishna, as rivers roil toward the sea or as moths fly into a blazing flame. All Arjuna can do as he gazes at this awe-ful sight is quake and tremble, having entirely lost his bearings.

奉爱运动的发展满足了民众内心深处对与终极存在建立某种个人联系的需求。然而，一旦梵天被确立为完全超越的存在，它就有可能变得过于超脱，如同古代的天神一样，从人类意识中消失。佛教中菩萨理想的演变以及毗湿奴的化身似乎代表了宗教发展的另一个阶段，在这个阶段，人们坚持认为绝对存在不能低于人类。然而，这些象征性的教义和神话否认绝对存在只能通过一次显现来表达：历史上存在着众多的佛陀和菩萨，毗湿奴也拥有各种各样的化身。这些神话也表达了一种人类的理想：它们展现了人类觉悟或神化的境界，正如人类本应有的样子。

The development of bhakti answered a deep-rooted popular need for some kind of personal relationship with the ultimate. Having established Brahman as utterly transcendent, there is a danger that it could become too rarefied and, like the ancient Sky God, fade from human consciousness. The evolution of the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism and the avatars of Vishnu seem to represent another stage in religious development when people insist that the Absolute cannot be less than human. These symbolic doctrines and myths deny that the Absolute can be expressed in only one epiphany, however: there were numerous Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and Vishnu had a variety of avatars. These myths also express an ideal for humanity: they show mankind enlightened or deified, as he was meant to be.

公元一世纪，犹太教中也出现了类似的对神圣临在的渴望。耶稣似乎满足了这种需求。最早的基督教作家圣保罗创立了我们今天所知的基督教，他认为耶稣取代了律法书，成为上帝向世人启示自身的主要途径。 ¹⁵我们很难确切地知道他这话是什么意思。保罗的书信是对特定问题的零星回应，而非对一套完整神学体系的连贯阐述。他无疑相信耶稣是弥赛亚：“基督”一词正是希伯来语“ Massiach”（受膏者）的译文。保罗谈论耶稣时，仿佛他超越了普通人，尽管作为一名犹太人，保罗并不相信耶稣是道成肉身的上帝。他经常用“在基督里”来描述他与耶稣的经历：基督徒“活在基督里”；他们受洗归入基督的死；教会以某种方式构成了基督的身体。¹⁶这并非保罗用逻辑论证的真理。像许多犹太人一样，他对希腊理性主义持轻蔑态度，称之为“愚昧”。17^正是主观的、神秘的体验，使他将耶稣描述为一种氛围，在这种氛围中，“我们”活着，行动，存在。” ¹⁸耶稣成了保罗宗教体验的源泉：因此，他谈论耶稣的方式，就像他的一些同时代人谈论神一样。

By the first century CE, there had been a similar thirst for divine immanence in Judaism. The person of Jesus had seemed to answer that need. St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s principal revelation of himself to the world.¹⁵ It is not easy to know exactly what he meant by this. Paul’s letters were occasional responses to specific questions rather than a coherent account of a fully articulated theology. He certainly believed that Jesus had been the Messiah: the word “Christ” was a translation of the Hebrew Massiach: the Anointed One. Paul also talked about the man Jesus as though he had been more than an ordinary human being, even though, as a Jew, Paul did not believe that he had been God incarnate. He constantly used the phrase “in Christ” to describe his experience of Jesus: Christians live “in Christ”; they have been baptized into his death; the Church somehow constitutes his body.¹⁶ This was not a truth which Paul argued logically. Like many Jews, he took a dim view of Greek rationalism, which he described as mere “foolishness.”¹⁷ It was a subjective and mystical experience that made him describe Jesus as a sort of atmosphere in which “we live and move and have our being.”¹⁸ Jesus had become the source of Paul’s religious experience: he was, therefore, talking about him in ways that some of his contemporaries might have talked about a god.

保罗在解释他所继承的信仰时说，耶稣“为我们的罪”受苦受难，最终死去。 ¹⁹ 这表明，在很早的时候，耶稣的门徒们就因耶稣之死的震惊而感到悲痛，他们解释说，耶稣的死在某种程度上是为了我们的益处。在第九章中，我们将看到，在十七世纪，其他犹太人也对另一位弥赛亚的离世给出了类似的解释。早期基督徒认为，耶稣以某种神秘的方式仍然活着，他所拥有的“能力”如今也体现在他们身上，正如他所应许的那样。我们从保罗的书信中得知，早期基督徒经历了各种各样不同寻常的事情，这些经历可能预示着一种新型人类的出现：有些人成了信仰医治者，有些人能说天上的语言，还有一些人传达了他们认为是来自上帝的启示。当时的教会礼拜热闹非凡，充满魅力，与如今教区教堂里庄重典雅的晚祷截然不同​​。耶稣的死似乎确实在某种程度上带来了益处：它开启了一种“新的生命”和一种“新的创造”——这是保罗书信中反复出现的主题^。20

When Paul explained the faith that had been handed on to him, he said that Jesus had suffered and died “for our sins,”¹⁹ showing that at a very early stage, Jesus’ disciples, shocked by the scandal of his death, had explained it by saying that it had somehow been for our benefit. In Chapter 9, we shall see that during the seventeenth century other Jews would find a similar explanation for the scandalous end of yet another Messiah. The early Christians felt that Jesus was in some mysterious way still alive and that the “powers” that he had possessed were now embodied in them, as he had promised. We know from Paul’s epistles that the first Christians had all kinds of unusual experiences that could have indicated the advent of a new type of humanity: some had become faith healers, some spoke in heavenly languages, others delivered what they believed were inspired oracles from God. Church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong today at the parish church. It seemed that Jesus’ death had indeed been beneficial in some way: it had released a “new kind of life” and a “new creation”—a constant theme in Paul’s letters.²⁰

然而，当时并没有关于耶稣受难是为亚当的“原罪”赎罪的详细理论：我们将看到，这种神学直到四世纪才出现，而且只在西方比较重要。保罗和其他新约作者从未试图对他们所经历的救赎做出精确的、最终的解释。然而，基督牺牲之死的概念与当时在印度兴起的菩萨理想相似。如同菩萨一样，基督实际上成为了人类与至高神之间的中保，不同之处在于，基督是唯一的中保，他所带来的救赎并非像菩萨那样是对未来的未实现的期盼，而是既成事实。保罗坚持认为耶稣的牺牲是独一无二的。虽然他相信自己为他人受苦是有益的，但保罗非常清楚，耶稣的受难和死亡完全是另一种境界。21^这里存在一个潜在的危险。无数的佛陀和神秘莫测、充满悖论的化身都在提醒信徒，终极实在无法用任何单一的形式充分表达。基督教的单一化身暗示着上帝无穷无尽的实在全部显现于一人之身，这可能会导致一种不成熟的偶像崇拜。

There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some “original sin” of Adam: we shall see that this theology did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West. Paul and the other New Testament writers never attempted a precise, definitive explanation of the salvation they had experienced. Yet the notion of Christ’s sacrificial death was similar to the ideal of the bodhisattva, which was developing at this time in India. Like the bodhisattva, Christ had, in effect, become a mediator between humanity and the Absolute, the difference being that Christ was the only mediator and the salvation he effected was not an unrealized aspiration for the future, like that of the bodhisattva, but a fait accompli. Paul insisted that Jesus’ sacrifice had been unique. Although he believed that his own sufferings on behalf of others were beneficial, Paul was quite clear that Jesus’ suffering and death were in quite a different league.²¹ There is a potential danger here. The innumerable Buddhas and the elusive, paradoxical avatars all reminded the faithful that ultimate reality could not be adequately expressed in any one form. The single Incarnation of Christianity, suggesting that the whole of the inexhaustible reality of God had been manifest in just one human being, could lead to an immature type of idolatry.

耶稣曾坚持认为，上帝的“能力”并非他一人独享。保罗进一步阐述了这一洞见，他认为耶稣是新型人类的开端。他不仅完成了旧以色列人未能完成的一切，而且成为了新亚当（adām），即所有人类，包括非犹太人（goyim），都必须以某种方式参与其中。22^这与佛教的信仰颇为相似，佛教认为，既然所有佛陀都已与绝对合一，那么人类的理想便是参与成佛。

Jesus had insisted that the “powers” of God were not for him alone. Paul developed this insight by arguing that Jesus had been the first example of a new type of humanity. Not only had he done everything that the old Israel had failed to achieve, but he had become the new adām, the new humanity in which all human beings, goyim included, must somehow participate.²² Again, this is not dissimilar to the Buddhist belief that, since all Buddhas had become one with the Absolute, the human ideal was to participate in Buddhahood.

保罗在写给腓立比教会的信中引用了一首通常被认为是早期基督教圣歌的赞美诗，这首赞美诗提出了一些重要的问题。他告诉他的信徒，他们必须像耶稣一样有自我牺牲的精神。

In his letter to the Church at Philippi, Paul quotes what is generally considered to be a very early Christian hymn which raises some important issues. He tells his converts that they must have the same self-sacrificing attitude as Jesus,

这首赞美诗似乎反映了早期基督徒的一种信念，即耶稣在成为人之前，曾“与神同在”，并通过“虚己”（kenosis）的方式，如同菩萨一般，决定分担人类的苦难。保罗的犹太身份使他无法接受基督作为与耶和华并列的第二位神从亘古就存在的观点。这首赞美诗表明，在他被提升之后，他仍然与神有所区别，并且低于神，是神提升了他，并赋予他……称号归于他。他自己不能自称，这个称号只是“为了荣耀父神”而被赋予的。

The hymn seems to reflect a belief among the first Christians that Jesus had enjoyed some kind of prior existence “with God” before becoming a man in the act of “self-emptying” (kenosis) by which, like a bodhisattva, he had decided to share the suffering of the human condition. Paul was too Jewish to accept the idea of Christ existing as a second divine being beside YHWH from all eternity. The hymn shows that after his exaltation he is still distinct from and inferior to God, who raises him and confers the title kyrios upon him. He cannot assume it himself but is given this title only “to the glory of God the Father.”

大约四十年后，《约翰福音》（约公元100年成书）的作者提出了类似的观点。他在序言中描述了“道”（逻各斯），这道“从起初就与神同在”，并且是创造的媒介：“万物都是藉着他造的；凡被造的，没有一样不是藉着他造的。” ²⁴这位作者使用希腊语“逻各斯”的方式与斐洛不同：他似乎更倾向于巴勒斯坦犹太教而非希腊化的犹太教。在当时正在编纂的希伯来圣经亚兰语译本——塔古姆（Targum）中， “memra”（道）一词被用来描述神在世间的作为。它与其他一些术语，如“荣耀”、“圣灵”和“舍金纳”（Shekinah）的功能相同，这些术语强调了神在世间的临在与神本身不可理解的本质之间的区别。如同神圣的智慧一样，“道”象征着上帝最初的创造计划。当保罗和约翰谈到耶稣时，仿佛他拥有某种先存的生命，他们并非暗示他是后来三位一体意义上的第二个神圣“位格”。他们是在表明耶稣已经超越了时间性和个体性的存在方式。因为他所代表的“能力”和“智慧”都源于上帝，所以他以某种方式表达了“起初就存在的”。 ²⁵

Some forty years later, the author of St. John’s Gospel (written ca. 100) made a similar suggestion. In his prologue, he described the Word (logos) which had been “with God from the beginning” and had been the agent of creation: “Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him.”²⁴ The author was not using the Greek word logos in the same way as Philo: he appears to have been more in tune with Palestinian than Hellenized Judaism. In the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew scriptures known as the targums, which were being composed at this time, the term Memra (word) is used to describe God’s activity in the world. It performs the same function as other technical terms like “glory,” “Holy Spirit” and “Shekinah” which emphasized the distinction between God’s presence in the world and the incomprehensible reality of God itself. Like the divine Wisdom, the “Word” symbolized God’s original plan for creation. When Paul and John spoke about Jesus as though he had some kind of preexistent life, they were not suggesting that he was a second divine “person” in the later Trinitarian sense. They were indicating that Jesus had transcended temporal and individual modes of existence. Because the “power” and “wisdom” that he represented were activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed “what was there from the beginning.”²⁵

这些思想在纯粹的犹太语境下是可以理解的，尽管后来具有希腊背景的基督徒会以不同的方式解读它们。在公元100年左右写成的《使徒行传》中，我们可以看到，早期基督徒仍然完全持有犹太教的上帝观。在五旬节那天，数百名犹太人从散居各地聚集在耶路撒冷，庆祝西奈山上律法的恩赐，圣灵降临在耶稣的门徒身上。他们听到“好像从天上有大风吹来……又有舌头如火焰显现出来。” ²⁶圣灵向这些早期的犹太基督徒显现，正如祂向同时代的其他犹太教祭司（塔纳伊姆）显现一样。门徒们立刻冲到外面，开始向来自“美索不达米亚、犹太、卡帕多西亚、本都、亚细亚、弗吕家、旁非利亚、埃及和古利奈一带的利比亚”的犹太人和敬畏上帝的人们传道。²⁷令众人惊奇的是，他们听见门徒用他们的母语讲道。彼得站起来向众人讲话时，将这一现象描述为犹太教的巅峰。先知们曾预言，上帝会将他的灵浇灌在全人类身上，甚至妇女和奴隶也会如此。^他会得到异象，也会做梦。28这一天将开启弥赛亚国度，届时上帝将与他的子民一同住在地上。彼得并没有宣称拿撒勒人耶稣就是上帝。他“是人，上帝藉着他在你们中间所行的神迹、异能和神迹，将他推荐给你们。”在他惨死之后，上帝使他复活，并“用上帝的右手”将他高举到极高的地位。先知和诗篇作者都预言了这些事；因此，“以色列全家”可以确信耶稣就是人们期盼已久的弥赛亚。29^这篇讲道似乎是早期基督徒的信息（ kerygma ）。

These ideas were comprehensible in a strictly Jewish context, though later Christians with a Greek background would interpret them differently. In the Acts of the Apostles, written as late as 100 CE, we can see that the first Christians still had an entirely Jewish conception of God. On the feast of Pentecost, when hundreds of Jews had congregated in Jerusalem from all over the diaspora to celebrate the gift of the Torah on Sinai, the Holy Spirit had descended upon Jesus’ companions. They heard “what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven … and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire.”²⁶ The Holy Spirit had manifested itself to these first Jewish Christians as it had to their contemporaries, the tannaim. Immediately the disciples rushed outside and began preaching to the crowds of Jews and Godfearers from “Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene.”²⁷ To their amazement, everybody heard the disciples preaching in his own language. When Peter rose to address the crowd, he presented this phenomenon as the apogee of Judaism. The prophets had foretold the day when God would pour out his Spirit upon mankind so that even women and slaves would have visions and dream dreams.²⁸ This day would inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom, when God would live on earth with his people. Peter did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God. He “was a man, commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you.” After his cruel death, God had raised him to life and had exalted him to a specially high status “by God’s right hand.” The prophets and Psalmists had all foretold these events; thus the “whole House of Israel” could be certain that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah.²⁹ This speech appears to have been the message (kerygma) of the earliest Christians.

到四世纪末，基督教在《使徒行传》作者所列举的那些地方已经发展壮大：它在散居各地的犹太会堂中扎根，吸引了大量敬畏上帝的人或皈依者。保罗改革后的犹太教似乎解决了他们的许多困境。他们也“说着各种方言”，缺乏统一的声音和连贯的立场。许多散居各地的犹太人开始将耶路撒冷圣殿视为原始而野蛮的机构，因为圣殿里浸满了牲畜的血。《使徒行传》在司提反的故事中保留了这种观点。司提反是一位希腊化的犹太人，他皈依了耶稣教派，却因亵渎神明而被犹太最高议会——公会——用石头砸死。在他最后的激情演讲中，司提反声称圣殿是对上帝本质的侮辱：“至高者不住在人手所造的殿宇里。” ³⁰一些散居各地的犹太人接受了拉比们在圣殿被毁后发展起来的塔木德犹太教；另一些人则发现基督教解答了他们关于《托拉》的地位和犹太教普世性的其他一些疑问。当然，基督教对敬畏上帝的人尤其具有吸引力，他们可以成为新以色列的正式成员，而无需承担全部613条诫命的负担。

By the end of the fourth century, Christianity had become strong in precisely the places listed above by the author of Acts: it took root among Jewish synagogues in the diaspora which had attracted a large number of Godfearers or proselytes. Paul’s reformed Judaism appeared to address many of their dilemmas. They also “spoke in many tongues,” lacking a united voice and a coherent position. Many diaspora Jews had come to regard the Temple in Jerusalem, drenched as it was in the blood of animals, as a primitive and barbarous institution. The Acts of the Apostles preserves this viewpoint in the story of Stephen, a Hellenistic Jew who had converted to the Jesus sect and was stoned to death by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing council, for blasphemy. In his last impassioned speech, Stephen had claimed that the Temple was an insult to the nature of God: “The Most High does not live in a home that human hands have built.”³⁰ Some diaspora Jews adopted the Talmudic Judaism developed by the Rabbis after the destruction of the Temple; others found that Christianity answered some of their other queries about the status of the Torah and the universality of Judaism. It was, of course, especially attractive to the Godfearers, who could become full members of the New Israel without the burden of all 613 mitzvot.

在公元一世纪，基督徒仍然像犹太人一样思考上帝并向他祈祷；他们像拉比一样辩论，他们的教会也与犹太会堂相似。公元80年代，基督徒因拒绝遵守《托拉》而被正式驱逐出犹太会堂，双方因此爆发了一些激烈的冲突。我们看到，犹太教在公元一世纪初的几十年里吸引了许多皈依者，但在公元70年之后，随着犹太人与罗马帝国关系紧张，他们的地位开始下降。敬畏上帝的犹太人转而信奉基督教，这使得犹太人对皈依者心存戒备，他们不再热衷于传教。一些原本会被犹太教吸引的异教徒现在转向了基督教，但这些人往往是奴隶和犹太教徒。基督教最初是在下层阶级中传播的。直到二世纪末，受过高等教育的异​​教徒才皈依基督教，并能够向充满怀疑的异教世界解释这种新的宗教。

During the first century, Christians continued to think about God and pray to him like Jews; they argued like Rabbis, and their churches were similar to the synagogues. There were some acrimonious disputes in the 80s with the Jews when Christians were formally ejected from the synagogues because they refused to observe the Torah. We have seen that Judaism had attracted many converts in the early decades of the first century, but after 70, when Jews were in trouble with the Roman empire, their position declined. The defection of the Godfearers to Christianity made Jews suspicious of converts, and they were no longer anxious to proselytize. Pagans who would formerly have been attracted to Judaism now turned to Christianity, but these tended to be slaves and members of the lower classes. It was not until the end of the second century that highly educated pagans became Christians and were able to explain the new religion to a suspicious pagan world.

在罗马帝国，基督教最初被视为犹太教的一个分支。但当基督徒明确表示他们不再是犹太会堂的成员时，他们便被视为狂热的宗教信徒，犯下了背离母教的“不敬神”之罪，因而备受鄙视。罗马人的价值观极其保守：他们珍视一家之主的权威和祖先的传统习俗。“进步”被视为回归黄金时代，而非无畏地迈向未来。刻意与过去决裂并不像我们当今社会那样被视为具有创造性，因为我们的社会已经将变革制度化。创新被视为危险和颠覆性的。罗马人对那些摆脱传统束缚的大规模运动抱有高度怀疑，并时刻警惕着保护他们的公民免受宗教“伪科学”的侵害。然而，帝国中弥漫着一种躁动不安的气氛。生活在一个庞大的国际帝国中，使人们觉得旧神渺小而无用；人们开始意识到那些陌生而令人不安的文化。他们寻求新的精神寄托。东方宗教被引入欧洲：伊西斯和塞墨勒等神祇与罗马的传统神祇——国家的守护神——一同被崇拜。公元一世纪，新兴的神秘宗教向信徒承诺救赎，并声称能让他们获得关于来世的内幕知识。但这些新的宗教热情并未威胁到旧秩序。东方神祇并不要求信徒彻底皈依旧教，摒弃熟悉的仪式，而是如同新的圣人，提供了一种崭新的视角和更广阔的世界观。你可以加入任意数量的神秘宗教：只要它们不试图威胁旧神，并保持相对低调，这些神秘宗教就会被容忍，并最终融入既定的秩序之中。

In the Roman empire, Christianity was first seen as a branch of Judaism, but when Christians made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, they were regarded with contempt as a religio of fanatics who had committed the cardinal sin of impiety by breaking with the parent faith. The Roman ethos was strictly conservative: it valued the authority of the paterfamilias and ancestral custom. “Progress” was seen as a return to a golden age, not as a fearless march forward into the future. A deliberate break with the past was not seen as potentially creative, as in our own society, which has institutionalized change. Innovation was regarded as dangerous and subversive. Romans were highly suspicious of mass movements that threw off the restraints of tradition and were on their guard to protect their citizens from religious “quackery.” There was a spirit of restlessness and anxiety in the empire, however. The experience of living in a huge international empire had made the old gods seem petty and inadequate; people had become aware of cultures that were alien and disturbing. They were looking for new spiritual solutions. Oriental cults were imported into Europe: deities like Isis and Semele were worshipped alongside the traditional gods of Rome, the guardians of the state. During the first century CE, the new mystery religions offered their initiates salvation and what purported to be inside knowledge of the next world. But none of these new religious enthusiasms threatened the old order. The Eastern deities did not demand a radical conversion and a rejection of the familiar rites but were like new saints, providing a fresh and novel outlook and a sense of a wider world. You could join as many different mystery cults as you liked: provided that they did not attempt to jeopardize the old gods and kept a reasonably low profile, the mystery religions were tolerated and absorbed into the established order.

没有人指望宗教会带来挑战，或者提供人生意义的答案。人们转向哲学寻求启迪。在古典时代晚期的罗马帝国，人们崇拜神灵，是为了在危机时刻祈求帮助，为国家祈求神灵的庇佑，并体验与过去延续的疗愈之感。宗教是一种崇拜和仪式，而非理念；它基于情感，而非意识形态或有意识地接受的理论。这种态度在今天并不陌生：我们社会中许多参加宗教仪式的人对神学不感兴趣，不想要过于奇特的东西，也不喜欢改变。他们发现既定的仪式……基督教为他们提供与传统的联系，并给予他们安全感。他们不期待从布道中听到什么惊世骇俗的见解，反而会对礼仪的改变感到不​​安。同样地，许多古代晚期的异教徒也像他们的祖辈一样，喜爱崇拜祖先的神灵。古老的仪式赋予他们身份认同感，颂扬地方传统，并让他们确信一切都会照常进行。文明似乎是脆弱的产物，不应因肆意忽视守护神而受到威胁，因为守护神会确保文明的延续。如果一种新的宗教试图废除他们祖先的信仰，他们会感到一种隐隐的威胁。因此，基督教兼具两者的缺点。它既缺乏犹太教的悠久历史，又缺乏异教那些人人都能看到和欣赏的、引人入胜的仪式。同时，它也是一种潜在的威胁，因为基督徒坚持认为他们的神是唯一的神，而所有其他的神灵都是幻象。在罗马传记作家盖乌斯·苏埃托尼乌斯（公元70-160年）看来，基督教似乎是一种非理性的、古怪的运动，一种“新奇而又堕落的迷信”（superstitio nova et prava ） ，它之所以“堕落”，恰恰是因为它是“新的”。 ³¹

Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment. In the Roman empire of late antiquity, people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a divine blessing for the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past. Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion, not on ideology or consciously adopted theory. This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and dislike the idea of change. They find that the established rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security. They do not expect brilliant ideas from the sermon and are disturbed by changes in the liturgy. In rather the same way, many of the pagans of late antiquity loved to worship the ancestral gods, as generations had done before them. The old rituals gave them a sense of identity, celebrated local traditions and seemed an assurance that things would continue as they were. Civilization seemed a fragile achievement and should not be threatened by wantonly disregarding the patronal gods, who would ensure its survival. They would feel obscurely threatened if a new cult set out to abolish the faith of their fathers. Christianity, therefore, had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions. Christianity seemed an irrational and eccentric movement to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius (70–160), a superstitio nova et prava, which was “depraved” precisely because it was “new.”³¹

受过教育的异教徒寻求启迪的途径并非宗教，而是哲学。他们崇拜的圣人和贤哲是古代的哲学家，例如柏拉图、毕达哥拉斯和爱比克泰德。他们甚至视这些人为“神之子”：例如，柏拉图就被认为是阿波罗之子。哲学家们对宗教保持着一种冷静的尊重，但认为宗教与他们所从事的本质上截然不同。他们并非象牙塔里枯燥乏味的学者，而是肩负使命的人，渴望通过引导同时代人投身于各自学派的学术研究来拯救他们的灵魂。苏格拉底和柏拉图都以“宗教”般的虔诚对待他们的哲学，他们发现，科学和形而上学的研究激发了他们对宇宙荣耀的领悟。因此，到了公元一世纪，有识之士开始向他们寻求对生命意义的解释、鼓舞人心的思想体系和伦理准则。基督教在他们看来则是一种野蛮的信条。基督教的上帝似乎是一位凶猛原始的神祇，他不断地、非理性地干预人类事务：他与亚里士多德等哲学家笔下遥远而永恒不变的上帝截然不同。认为像柏拉图或亚历山大大帝这样的人物是神的儿子是一回事，但认为一个在罗马帝国偏僻角落里耻辱地死去的犹太人是神的儿子则是另一回事。

Educated pagans looked to philosophy, not religion, for enlightenment. Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of antiquity as Plato, Pythagoras and Epictetus. They even saw them as “sons of God”: Plato, for example, was held to have been the son of Apollo. The philosophers had maintained a cool respect for religion but saw it as essentially different from what they were doing. They were not dried-up academics in ivory towers but men with a mission, anxious to save the souls of their contemporaries by attracting them to the disciplines of their particular school. Both Socrates and Plato had been “religious” about their philosophy, finding that their scientific and metaphysical studies had inspired them with a vision of the glory of the universe. By the first century CE, therefore, intelligent and thoughtful people turned to them for an explanation of the meaning of life, for an inspiring ideology and for ethical motivation. Christianity seemed a barbaric creed. The Christian God seemed a ferocious, primitive deity, who kept intervening irrationally in human affairs: he had nothing in common with the remote, changeless God of a philosopher like Aristotle. It was one thing to suggest that men of the caliber of Plato or Alexander the Great had been sons of a god, but a Jew who had died a disgraceful death in an obscure corner of the Roman empire was quite another matter.

柏拉图主义是古代晚期最流行的哲学之一。公元一、二世纪的新柏拉图主义者并非被柏拉图的伦理和政治思想家身份所吸引，而是被柏拉图的神秘主义思想所吸引。他的教义这套体系将帮助哲学家实现真我，将灵魂从肉体的牢笼中解放出来，使其升华至神圣世界。这是一个高贵的体系，它以宇宙论为象征，展现连续性和和谐性。“一”超越时间与变迁的侵蚀，静静地沉思自身，屹立于存在之链的顶端。万物皆源于“一”，这是其纯粹存在的必然结果：永恒的形体源于“一”，并反过来赋予太阳、星辰和月亮以生命，各自在其领域中运行。最终，诸神——如今被视为“一”的天使使者——将神圣的影响传递至尘世的人类世界。柏拉图主义者无需那些关于神祇突然决定创造世界或无视既定等级制度直接与一小群人类沟通的野蛮故事。他也不需要通过被钉在十字架上的弥赛亚来实现的怪诞救赎。由于哲学家与赋予万物生命的上帝相似，因此哲学家可以通过理性、有序的方式，凭借自身的努力升入神圣的世界。

Platonism was one of the most popular philosophies of late antiquity. The new Platonists of the first and second century were not attracted to Plato the ethical and political thinker but to Plato the mystic. His teachings would help the philosopher to realize his true self, by liberating his soul from the prison of the body and enabling him to ascend to the divine world. It was a noble system, which used cosmology as an image of continuity and harmony. The One existed in serene contemplation of itself beyond the ravages of time and change at the pinnacle of the great chain of being. All existence derived from the One as a necessary consequence of its pure being: the eternal forms had emanated from the One and had in their turn animated the sun, stars and moon, each in their respective sphere. Finally the gods, who were now seen as the angelic ministers of the One, transmitted the divine influence to the sublunary world of men. The Platonist needed no barbaric tales of a deity who suddenly decided to create the world or who ignored the established hierarchy to communicate directly with a small group of human beings. He needed no grotesque salvation by means of a crucified Messiah. Since he was akin to the God who had given life to all things, a philosopher could ascend to the divine world by means of his own efforts in a rational, ordered way.

基督徒该如何向异教世界解释他们的信仰呢？他们的信仰似乎不上不下，既非罗马意义上的宗教，也非哲学。此外，基督徒很难列举出他们的“信仰”，或许他们也并未意识到自己正在发展出一套独特的思想体系。在这方面，他们与异教邻居颇为相似。他们的宗教没有连贯的“神学”，更准确地说，应该将其描述为一种精心培养的奉献态度。当他们背诵“信条”时，并非是在认同一系列命题。例如，希腊语单词“ credere ”似乎源自“cor dare”，意为“献出自己的心”。当他们说“credo！”（或希腊语中的“ pisteno”）时，这表达的是一种情感而非理性的立场。因此，公元392年至428年间担任奇里乞亚摩普绥提亚主教的狄奥多尔向他的皈依者解释道：

How could the Christians explain their faith to the pagan world? It seemed to fall between two stools, appearing to be neither a religion, in the Roman sense, nor a philosophy. Moreover, Christians would have found it hard to list their “beliefs” and may not have been conscious of evolving a distinctive system of thought. In this they resembled their pagan neighbors. Their religion had no coherent “theology” but could more accurately be described as a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment. When they recited their “creeds,” they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere, for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one’s heart. When they said “credo!” (or pisteno in Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position. Thus Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 to 428, explained to his converts:

后来的基督徒需要对他们的信仰做出更具理论性的阐述，并发展出一种在世界宗教史上独一无二的神学辩论热情。例如，我们已经看到，犹太教没有官方的正统教义，关于上帝的观念本质上属于个人私事。早期基督徒也持有这种态度。

Later Christians would need to give a more theoretical account of their faith and would develop a passion for theological debate that is unique in the history of world religion. We have seen, for example, that there was no official orthodoxy in Judaism but that ideas about God were essentially private matters. The early Christians would have shared this attitude.

然而，在公元二世纪，一些皈依基督教的异教徒试图向不信教的邻居们解释，他们的宗教并非对传统的破坏性背离。最早的护教者之一是凯撒利亚的查士丁（公元100-165年），他为信仰殉道。在他孜孜不倦地寻求人生意义的过程中，我们可以感受到那个时代的精神焦虑。查士丁既非博学之士，也非才华横溢之人。在皈依基督教之前，他曾拜师于斯多葛学派、逍遥学派和毕达哥拉斯学派，但显然未能理解这些学派体系的精髓。他缺乏哲学的气质和智慧，但似乎需要的不仅仅是宗教仪式和宗教崇拜。最终，他在基督教中找到了答案。在他两篇护教论著（约公元150年和155年）中，他论证说基督徒只是追随柏拉图，而柏拉图也坚持认为只有一位神。希腊哲学家和犹太先知都曾预言基督的降临——这一论点在当时的异教徒看来颇具说服力，因为那时人们对神谕的热情空前高涨。他还认为耶稣是逻各斯（logos）或神圣理性的化身，斯多葛学派认为逻各斯体现在宇宙秩序之中；逻各斯在历史上一直活跃于世，启发着希腊人和希伯来人。然而，他并未解释这一颇为新颖的观点背后的含义：人如何能化身为逻各斯？逻各斯是否等同于圣经中“圣言”或“智慧”等意象？它与独一真神之间又存在怎样的关系？

During the second century, however, some pagan converts to Christianity tried to reach out to their unbelieving neighbors in order to show that their religion was not a destructive breach with tradition. One of the first of these apologists was Justin of Caesarea (100–165), who died a martyr for the faith. In his restless search for meaning, we can sense the spiritual anxiety of the period. Justin was neither a profound nor a brilliant thinker. Before turning to Christianity, he had sat at the feet of a Stoic, a peripatetic philosopher and a Pythagorean but had clearly failed to understand what was involved in their systems. He lacked the temperament and intelligence for philosophy but seemed to need more than the worship of cult and ritual. He found his solution in Christianity. In his two apologiae (ca. 150 and 155), he argued that Christians were simply following Plato, who had also maintained that there was only one God. Both the Greek philosophers and the Jewish prophets had foretold the coming of Christ—an argument which would have impressed the pagans of his day, since there was a fresh enthusiasm for oracles. He also argued that Jesus was the incarnation of the logos or divine reason, which the Stoics had seen in the order of the cosmos; the logos had been active in the world throughout history, inspiring Greeks and Hebrews alike. He did not, however, explain the implications of this somewhat novel idea: how could a human being incarnate the logos? was the logos the same as such biblical images as Word or Wisdom? What was its relation to the One God?

其他基督徒发展出更为激进的神学，并非出于对思辨本身的热爱，而是为了缓解内心深处的焦虑。特别是那些被称为“诺斯替教徒”（gnostikoi，意为“知晓者”）的人，他们从哲学转向神话，以此来解释他们与神圣世界之间强烈的疏离感。他们的神话直面他们对上帝和神性的无知，而这种无知显然是他们痛苦和羞耻的根源。公元130年至160年间在亚历山大城任教的巴西利德斯，以及离开埃及前往罗马传教的同代人瓦伦提努斯，都拥有大量的追随者，他们也表明，许多皈依基督教的人感到迷茫、漂泊和彻底的失落。

Other Christians were developing far more radical theologies, not out of love of speculation for its own sake but to assuage a profound anxiety. In particular, the gnostikoi, the Knowing Ones, turned from philosophy to mythology to explain their acute sense of separation from the divine world. Their myths confronted their ignorance about God and the divine, which they clearly experienced as a source of grief and shame. Basilides, who taught in Alexandria between 130 and 160, and his contemporary Valentinus, who left Egypt to teach in Rome, both acquired a huge following and showed that many of the people who converted to Christianity felt lost, adrift and radically displaced.

诺斯替教的一切都始于一个完全无法理解的实在，他们称之为神性，因为它是我们称之为^“上帝”的低等存在的源头。我们对它一无所知，因为它完全超出了我们有限的思维所能理解的范围。正如瓦伦丁所解释的，神性是

The Gnostics all began with an utterly incomprehensible reality which they called the Godhead, since it was the source of the lesser being that we call ^“God.” There was nothing at all that we could say about it, since it entirely eludes the grasp of our limited minds. As Valentinus explained, the Godhead was

人们一直以来都在推测这个绝对存在，但他们的解释都无法令人满意。神性既非“善”也非“恶”，甚至不能说它“存在”，因此无法描述。巴西利德斯教导说，起初并不存在上帝，只有神性，而严格来说，神性是虚无，因为它在我们所能理解的任何意义上都不存在^。34

Men have always speculated about this Absolute, but none of their explanations have been adequate. It is impossible to describe the Godhead, which is neither “good” nor “evil” and cannot even be said to “exist.” Basilides taught that in the beginning, there had been not God but only the Godhead, which, strictly speaking, was Nothing because it did not exist in any sense that we can understand.³⁴

然而，这虚无渴望显现自身，并不满足于独自沉寂于深渊与寂静之中。在其深不可测的存在深处，一场内在的革命悄然发生，由此产生了一系列类似于古代异教神话中所描述的显现。这些显现中的第一个便是我们所熟知并祈祷的“神”。然而，即使是“神”也难以被我们理解，需要进一步的阐释。因此，新的显现成对地从神那里产生，每对显现都展现了神的一项神圣属性。“神”超越性别，但如同《埃努玛·埃利什》中所记载的那样，每一对显现都由一男一女组成——这种模式试图中和传统一神论中固有的男性特质。每一对显现都变得越来越弱小，越来越微弱，因为它们离神圣的源头越来越远。最终，当三十个这样的显现（或称永世）出现之后，这个过程停止了，神圣的世界，即普勒罗玛，也就此完成。诺斯替教徒提出的宇宙论并非完全荒谬，因为人人都相信宇宙中充满了各种永恒存在、恶魔和灵力。圣保罗曾提及宝座、统治、主权和力量，而哲学家们则认为这些无形的力量就是远古的神祇，并将它们视为人类与“一”之间的媒介。

But this Nothingness had wished to make itself known and was not content to remain alone in Depth and Silence. There was an inner revolution in the depths of its unfathomable being which resulted in a series of emanations similar to those described in the ancient pagan mythologies. The first of these emanations was the “God,” which we know and pray to. Yet even “God” was inaccessible to us and needed further elucidation. Consequently new emanations proceeded from God in pairs, each of which expressed one of his divine attributes. “God” lay beyond gender but, as in the Enuma Elish, each pair of emanations consisted of a male and female—a scheme which attempted to neutralize the masculine tenor of more conventional monotheism. Each pair of emanations grew weaker and more attenuated, since they were getting ever further from their divine Source. Finally, when thirty such emanations (or aeons) had emerged, the process stopped and the divine world, the Pleroma, was complete. The Gnostics were not proposing an entirely outrageous cosmology, since everybody believed that the cosmos was teeming with such aeons, demons and spiritual powers. St. Paul had referred to Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties and Powers, while the philosophers had believed that these invisible powers were the ancient gods and had made them intermediaries between man and the One.

曾发生过一场灾难，一次原始的堕落，诺斯替教徒对此有各种不同的描述。有人说，最后一位流溢者索菲亚（智慧）因渴望获得关于不可接近的神性的禁忌知识而堕落。由于她狂妄自大，她从普勒罗玛（圆满之境）坠落，她的悲痛和苦难化作了物质世界。被放逐和迷失的索菲亚在宇宙中游荡，渴望回归她的神圣源头。这种东方和异教思想的融合表达了诺斯替教徒对我们世界的深刻理解。从某种意义上说，它是对天界的扭曲，源于无知和迷失。其他诺斯替教徒认为，“上帝”并未创造物质世界，因为他不可能与低等物质有任何瓜葛。这乃是永恒者之一所为，他们称之为造物主（demiourgos）。他嫉妒“上帝”，渴望成为普勒罗玛（Pleroma）的中心。因此，他堕落了，并在愤怒的驱使下创造了世界。正如瓦伦提努斯所解释的，他“在无知的情况下创造了天堂；在对人一无所知的情况下创造了人；在不了解地球的情况下将地球带到光明之中。” ³⁵但另一位永恒者——逻各斯（Logos）——前来拯救，降临人间，化身为耶稣，教导世人回归上帝的道路。最终，这种基督教形式会被压制，但我们将看到，几个世纪后，犹太人、基督徒和穆斯林会回归这种神话，发现它比正统神学更准确地表达了他们对“上帝”的宗教体验。

There had been a catastrophe, a primal fall, which the Gnostics described in various ways. Some said that Sophia (Wisdom), the last of the emanations, fell from grace because she aspired to a forbidden knowledge of the inaccessible Godhead. Because of her overweening presumption, she had fallen from the Pleroma and her grief and distress had formed the world of matter. Exiled and lost, Sophia had wandered through the cosmos, yearning to return to her divine Source. This amalgam of oriental and pagan ideas expressed the Gnostics’ profound sense that our world was in some sense a perversion of the celestial, born of ignorance and dislocation. Other Gnostics taught that “God” had not created the material world, since he could have had nothing to do with base matter. This had been the work of one of the aeons, which they called the demiourgos or Creator. He had become envious of “God” and aspired to be the center of the Pleroma. Consequently he fell and had created the world in a fit of defiance. As Valentinus explained, he had “made heaven without knowledge; he formed man in ignorance of man; he brought earth to light without understanding earth.”³⁵ But the Logos, another of the aeons, had come to the rescue and descended to earth, assuming the physical appearance of Jesus in order to teach men and women the way back to God. Eventually this type of Christianity would be suppressed, but we shall see that centuries later Jews, Christians and Muslims would return to this type of mythology, finding that it expressed their religious experience of “God” more accurately than orthodox theology.

这些神话从来就不是对创世和救赎的字面描述；它们是对内在真理的象征性表达。“上帝”和普勒罗玛并非“外在”的现实，而是存在于内心深处：

These myths were never intended as literal accounts of creation and salvation; they were symbolic expressions of an inner truth. “God” and the Pleroma were not external realities “out there” but were to be found within:

普勒罗玛象征着灵魂的地图。即使身处黑暗世界，只要诺斯替教徒知道该往何处寻觅，也能辨识出神圣之光：在原始堕落时期——无论是索菲亚还是造物主——一些神圣火花也从普勒罗玛坠落，被困于物质之中。诺斯替教徒可以在自己的灵魂中找到神圣火花，觉察到自身内在的神圣元素，从而找到回家的路。

The Pleroma represented a map of the soul. The divine light could be discerned even in this dark world, if the Gnostic knew where to look: during the Primal Fall—of either Sophia or the Demiurge—some divine sparks had also fallen from the Pleroma and been trapped in matter. The Gnostic could find a divine spark in his own soul, could become aware of a divine element within himself which would help him to find his way home.

诺斯替教徒表明，许多新皈依基督教的人并不满足于他们从犹太教继承而来的传统上帝观念。他们并不认为世界是“美好的”，是仁慈的神灵的杰作。类似的二元论和错位感也体现在马西昂（100-165）的教义中，他创立了自己的教会，与基督教相抗衡。耶稣在罗马传道，吸引了众多追随者。他曾说过，好的树会结出好果子：³⁷既然世界明显充满了邪恶和痛苦，那么一位良善的神又怎能创造这个世界呢？马西昂也对犹太教经典感到震惊，因为这些经典似乎描述了一位严厉残酷的神，他为了追求正义而屠杀了整个族群。他认定，正是这位“好战、反复无常、自相矛盾”的犹太教神创造了世界^。38但耶稣揭示了另一位神的存在，这位神从未在犹太教经典中被提及。这位神“平静、温和、良善卓越” ^。39他与那位残酷的“司法”世界创造者截然不同。因此，我们应该远离这个世界，因为它并非耶稣所创造，所以无法告诉我们关于这位仁慈的神的任何信息；我们也应该摒弃“旧约”，而只专注于那些保存了耶稣精神的新约经卷。马西昂教义的流行表明他道出了人们普遍的焦虑。一度，他似乎要创立一个独立的教会。他触及了基督教信仰中一个重要的问题：一代又一代的基督徒都难以积极地与物质世界建立联系，而且至今仍有相当一部分人对希伯来人的上帝感到困惑。

The Gnostics showed that many of the new converts to Christianity were not satisfied with the traditional idea of God which they had inherited from Judaism. They did not experience the world as “good,” the work of a benevolent deity. A similar dualism and dislocation marked the doctrine of Marcion (100–165), who founded his own rival church in Rome and attracted a huge following. Jesus had said that a sound tree produced good fruit:³⁷ how could the world have been created by a good God when it was manifestly full of evil and pain? Marcion was also appalled by the Jewish scriptures, which seemed to describe a harsh, cruel God who exterminated whole populations in his passion for justice. He decided that it was this Jewish God, who was “lustful for war, inconstant in his attitudes and self-contradictory,”³⁸ who had created the world. But Jesus had revealed that another God existed, who had never been mentioned by the Jewish scriptures. This second God was “placid, mild and simply good and excellent.”³⁹ He was entirely different from the cruel “juridical” Creator of the world. We should, therefore, turn away from the world, which, since it was not his doing, could tell us nothing about this benevolent deity and should also reject the “Old” Testament, concentrating simply upon those New Testament books which had preserved the spirit of Jesus. The popularity of Marcion’s teachings showed that he had voiced a common anxiety. At one time it seemed as though he were about to found a separate Church. He had put his finger on something important in the Christian experience; generations of Christians have found it difficult to relate positively to the material world, and there are still a significant number who do not know what to make of the Hebrew God.

然而，北非神学家特土良（160-220）指出，马西昂笔下的“良善”上帝与希腊哲学中的上帝更为接近，而非圣经中的上帝。这位宁静祥和的神祇与这个充满缺陷的世界毫无瓜葛，他更接近亚里士多德所描述的“不动的推动者”，而非犹太教耶稣基督的上帝。事实上，在希腊罗马世界，许多人认为圣经中的上帝是一位笨拙而凶猛的神，不值得敬拜。大约在公元178年，异教哲学家塞尔苏斯指责基督徒对上帝持有狭隘而地方性的看法。他认为基督徒声称拥有特殊的启示是令人震惊的：上帝对所有人都是开放的，而基督徒却聚集在一个卑劣的小团体中，宣称：“上帝甚至抛弃了整个世界和天象，无视广袤的大地，只关注我们。” ⁴⁰当基督徒遭受罗马当局迫害时，他们被指控为“无神论者”，因为他们的神性观念严重冒犯了罗马的道德准则。人们担心，基督徒不尊重传统神祇，会危及国家安全，颠覆脆弱的秩序。基督教似乎是一种野蛮的信条，无视文明的成就。

The North African theologian Tertullian (160–220), however, pointed out that Marcion’s “good” God had more in common with the God of Greek philosophy than the God of the Bible. This serene deity, who had nothing to do with this flawed world, was far closer to the Unmoved Mover described by Aristotle than the Jewish God of Jesus Christ. Indeed, many people in the Greco-Roman world found the biblical God a blundering, ferocious deity who was unworthy of worship. In about 178 the pagan philosopher Celsus accused the Christians of adopting a narrow, provincial view of God. He found it appalling that the Christians should claim a special revelation of their own: God was available to all human beings, yet the Christians huddled together in a sordid little group, asserting: “God has even deserted the whole world and the motions of the heavens and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone.”⁴⁰ When Christians were persecuted by the Roman authorities, they were accused of “atheism” because their conception of divinity gravely offended the Roman ethos. By failing to give the traditional gods their due, people feared that the Christians would endanger the state and overturn the fragile order. Christianity seemed a barbarous creed that ignored the achievements of civilization.

然而，到了二世纪末，一些真正有教养的异教徒开始皈依基督教，并能够将圣经中的闪米特神与希腊罗马的理想相融合。其中第一位是亚历山大的克莱门特（约公元150-215年），他可能在皈依基督教之前曾在雅典学习过哲学。克莱门特毫不怀疑耶和华与希腊哲学家所信奉的上帝是同一位：他称柏拉图为“阿提卡的摩西”。然而，耶稣和圣保罗都会对他的神学感到惊讶。与柏拉图和亚里士多德的上帝一样，克莱门特的上帝也具有“无情”（apatheia）的特征：他完全没有情感，既不会感到痛苦，也不会改变。基督徒可以通过效法上帝的平静和沉着来参与这种神圣的生活。克莱门特制定了一套生活准则，与拉比们制定的详细行为准则惊人地相似，只是它更接近斯多葛学派的理想。基督徒应当在生活的方方面面效法神的宁静：他必须坐姿端正，说话轻声细语，避免剧烈、痉挛式的笑声，甚至连打嗝也要轻柔。通过这种刻意追求平静的勤勉操练，基督徒便会觉察到内心深处的宁静，这宁静便是神刻在他们生命中的形象。神与人之间不再有鸿沟。一旦基督徒符合了神的理想，他们就会发现有一位神圣的伴侣“与我们同住一屋，同席而坐，与我们一同承担生命中所有的道德努力。” ⁴¹

By the end of the second century, however, some truly cultivated pagans began to be converted to Christianity and were able to adapt the Semitic God of the Bible to the Greco-Roman ideal. The first of these was Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215), who may have studied philosophy in Athens before his conversion. Clement had no doubt that Yahweh and the God of the Greek philosophers were one and the same: he called Plato the Attic Moses. Yet both Jesus and St. Paul would have been surprised by his theology. Like the God of Plato and Aristotle, Clement’s God was characterized by his apatheia: he was utterly impassible, unable to suffer or change. Christians could participate in this divine life by imitating the calmness and imperturbability of God himself. Clement devised a rule of life that was remarkably similar to the detailed rules of conduct prescribed by the Rabbis except that it had more in common with the Stoic ideal. A Christian should imitate the serenity of God in every detail of his life: he must sit correctly, speak quietly, refrain from violent, convulsive laughter and even burp gently. By this diligent exercise of studied calm, Christians would become aware of a vast Quietness within, which was the image of God inscribed in their own being. There was no gulf between God and humanity. Once Christians had conformed to the divine ideal, they would find that they had a Divine Companion “sharing our house with us, sitting at table, sharing in the whole moral effort of our life.”⁴¹

然而，克莱门特也相信耶稣是神，“那位受苦受难、受人敬拜的永活神”。 ⁴²那位“用毛巾束脚，为他们洗脚”的神，是“谦卑的神，宇宙的主宰”。 ⁴³如果基督徒效法基督，他们也会被神化：神圣的、不朽的、不受苦难的。事实上，基督是道成肉身的神圣逻各斯，“为的是让你们从人身上学习如何成为神”。 ⁴⁴在西方，里昂主教爱任纽（130-200）也教导过类似的教义。耶稣是道成肉身的逻各斯，是神圣的理性。当他成为人时，他圣化了人类发展的每个阶段，并成为基督徒的榜样。他们应该效法他，就像人们相信演员会与他所扮演的角色融为一体，从而实现他们的人类潜能一样。 ⁴⁵克莱门特和爱任纽都在将犹太教的上帝形象融入他们各自时代和文化的观念之中。尽管克莱门特的“无情论”（apatheia）与先知们所信奉的上帝（其主要特征是悲悯和脆弱）几乎没有共同之处，但它却成为基督教上帝观的基础。在那个世界里，人们渴望超越情感和变幻莫测的纷扰，达到一种超乎常人的平静。尽管这种理想本身存在悖论，但它最终还是占据了主导地位。

Yet Clement also believed that Jesus was God, “the living God that suffered and is worshipped.”⁴² He who had “washed their feet, girded with a towel,” had been “the prideless God and Lord of the Universe.”⁴³ If Christians imitated Christ, they too would become deified: divine, incorruptible and impassible. Indeed, Christ had been the divine logos who had become man “so that you might learn from a man how to become God.”⁴⁴ In the West, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (130–200), had taught a similar doctrine. Jesus had been the incarnate Logos, the divine reason. When he had become man, he had sanctified each stage of human development and become a model for Christians. They should imitate him in rather the same way as an actor was believed to become one with the character he was portraying and would thus fulfill their human potential.⁴⁵ Clement and Irenaeus were both adapting the Jewish God to notions that were characteristic of their own time and culture. Even though it had little in common with the God of the prophets, who was chiefly characterized by his pathos and vulnerability, Clement’s doctrine of apatheia would become fundamental to the Christian conception of God. In the Greek world, people longed to rise above the mess of emotion and mutability and achieve a superhuman calm. This ideal prevailed, despite its inherent paradox.

克莱门特的基督教神学留下了一些关键问题悬而未决。一个凡人怎能成为道（Logos）或神圣理性？说耶稣是神究竟意味着什么？道（Logos）与“上帝之子”是同一概念吗？这个犹太称谓在希腊世界又意味着什么？一个无情的上帝怎能在耶稣身上受苦？基督徒怎能既相信耶稣是神，又同时坚持只有一位上帝？到了三世纪，基督徒们越来越意识到这些问题。在三世纪初的罗马，一位名叫萨贝利乌斯的神秘人物提出，圣经中的“圣父”、“圣子”和“圣灵”这几个词可以比作演员为了扮演角色、让观众听到他们的声音而戴上的面具（personae ）。因此，这位独一的上帝在与世人交往时，也曾戴上过不同的面具。萨贝利乌斯吸引了一些门徒，但大多数基督徒对他的理论感到不安：他认为，无情的上帝在扮演圣子的角色时，某种程度上也遭受了苦难，这种观点是他们完全无法接受的。然而，当公元260年至272年担任安提阿主教的萨摩萨塔的保罗提出耶稣只是一个人，上帝的圣言和智慧如同圣殿一般居住在他里面时，这种观点同样被认为是非正统的。保罗的神学在公元264年安提阿的一次宗教会议上遭到谴责，但他凭借帕尔米拉女王芝诺比亚的支持保住了主教之位。显然，要找到一种既能调和耶稣是神这一基督教信念，又能调和上帝是独一的这一同样坚定的信仰的方法，将是非常困难的。

Clement’s theology left crucial questions unanswered. How could a mere man have been the Logos or divine reason? What exactly did it mean to say that Jesus had been divine? Was the Logos the same as the “Son of God,” and what did this Jewish title mean in the Hellenic world? How could an impassible God have suffered in Jesus? How could Christians believe that he had been a divine being and yet, at the same time, insist that there was only one God? Christians were becoming increasingly aware of these problems during the third century. In the early years of the century in Rome, one Sabellius, a rather shadowy figure, had suggested that the biblical terms “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit” could be compared to the masks (personae) worn by actors to assume a dramatic role and to make their voices audible to the audience. The One God had thus donned different personae when dealing with the world. Sabellius attracted some disciples, but most Christians were distressed by his theory: it suggested that the impassible God had in some sense suffered when playing the role of the Son, an idea that they found quite unacceptable. Yet when Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 272, had suggested that Jesus had simply been a man, in whom the Word and Wisdom of God had dwelt as in a temple, this was considered equally unorthodox. Paul’s theology was condemned at a synod at Antioch in 264, though he managed to hold on to his see with the support of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. It was clearly going to be very difficult to find a way of accommodating the Christian conviction that Jesus had been divine with the equally strong belief that God was One.

公元202年，克莱门特离开亚历山大，前往耶路撒冷主教府担任神父。他留在教理学校的职位由他才华横溢的年轻学生奥利金接替，当时奥利金大约二十岁。奥利金年轻时就坚信殉道是通往天堂的途径。四年前，他的父亲列奥尼德斯在竞技场殉道，奥利金也曾试图追随父亲。然而，他的母亲藏起了他的衣服，救了他一命。奥利金最初认为基督徒的生活意味着与世界为敌，但他后来放弃了这种观点，发展出一种基督教柏拉图主义。奥利金不再认为上帝与世界之间存在一道无法逾越的鸿沟，只有通过殉道这种彻底的脱离才能弥合，而是发展出一种强调上帝与世界连续性的神学。光明、乐观和喜乐的灵性。基督徒可以一步步攀登存在的阶梯，直至抵达上帝——他与生俱来的本源和归宿。

When Clement had left Alexandria in 202 to become a priest in the service of the Bishop of Jerusalem, his place at the catechetical school was taken by his brilliant young pupil Origen, who was about twenty years old at the time. As a youth Origen had been passionately convinced that martyrdom was the way to heaven. His father, Leonides, had died in the arena four years earlier, and Origen had tried to join him. His mother, however, saved him by hiding his clothes. Origen had started by believing that the Christian life meant turning against the world, but he later abjured this position and developed a form of Christian Platonism. Instead of seeing an impassible gulf between God and the world, which could only be bridged by the radical dislocation of martyrdom, Origen developed a theology that stressed the continuity of God with the world. His was a spirituality of light, optimism and joy. Step by step, a Christian could ascend the chain of being until he reached God, his natural element and home.

作为一名柏拉图主义者，奥利金深信上帝与灵魂之间存在关联：对神圣的认知是人类与生俱来的。这种认知可以通过特殊的修行而被“唤起”和唤醒。为了使他的柏拉图哲学与闪米特圣经相契合，奥利金发展出一种象征性的圣经解读方法。因此，基督在玛利亚腹中的童贞诞生，并非首先被理解为一个字面意义上的事件，而是被理解为神圣智慧在灵魂中的诞生。他还吸收了一些诺斯替主义的思想。最初，灵界中的所有存在都曾默想那不可言喻的上帝，祂以逻各斯（神圣的言语和智慧）的形式向他们启示自己。但他们厌倦了这种完美的默想，从神圣的世界堕落到肉体之中，肉体阻止了他们的堕落。然而，一切并非就此结束。灵魂可以通过一段漫长而稳定的旅程升向上帝，这段旅程在死后仍将继续。灵魂将逐渐摆脱肉体的束缚，超越性别，成为纯粹的灵性。通过默想（theoria），灵魂在对神的认知（gnosis）中不断提升，最终如柏拉图所教导的那样，达到神性。神深不可测，我们人类的任何语言或概念都无法充分表达祂，但灵魂却拥有认识神的能力，因为它共享着神的神性。默想逻各斯（Logos）对我们而言是自然而然的，因为所有灵性存在（logikoi）最初都是平等的。当它们堕落之后，只有耶稣基督——这位未来的人——的心灵甘愿留在神圣的世界，默想神的圣言，而我们自身的灵魂与祂的灵魂是平等的。相信耶稣作为人的神性只是一个阶段；它会帮助我们前行，但最终，当我们与神面对面时，它将被超越。

As a Platonist, Origen was convinced of the kinship between God and the soul: the knowledge of the divine was natural to humanity. It could be “recollected” and awakened by special disciplines. To adapt his Platonic philosophy to the Semitic scriptures, Origen developed a symbolic method of reading the Bible. Thus the virgin birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not primarily to be understood as a literal event but as the birth of the divine Wisdom in the soul. He also adopted some of the ideas of the Gnostics. Originally, all the beings in the spiritual world had contemplated the ineffable God who had revealed himself to them in the Logos, the divine Word and Wisdom. But they had grown tired of this perfect contemplation and fallen from the divine world into bodies, which had arrested their fall. All was not lost, however. The soul could ascend to God in a long, steady journey that would continue after death. Gradually it would cast aside the fetter of the body and rise above gender to become pure spirit. By means of contemplation (theoria), the soul would advance in the knowledge (gnosis) of God, which would transform it until, as Plato himself had taught, it would itself become divine. God was deeply mysterious and none of our human words or concepts could adequately express him, but the soul had the capacity to know God, since it shared his divine nature. Contemplation of the Logos was natural to us, since all spiritual beings (logikoi) had originally been equal to one another. When they had fallen, only the future mind of the man Jesus Christ had been content to remain in the divine world contemplating God’s Word, and our own souls were equal to his. Belief in the divinity of Jesus the man was only a phase; it would help us on our way, but would eventually be transcended when we would see God face to face.

九世纪时，教会谴责奥利金的一些思想为异端。奥利金和克莱门特都不相信上帝从无到有（ex nihilo）创造了世界，而这后来却成为正统基督教教义。奥利金关于耶稣神性和人类救赎的观点显然与后来的官方基督教教义不符：他不认为我们是因基督的死而“得救”，而是凭借自身的力量升天。关键在于，在奥利金和克莱门特撰写和宣讲他们的基督教柏拉图主义时，并没有官方教义。没有人确切知道上帝是否创造了世界，或者人类是如何具有神性的。四、五世纪的动荡事件，只有在经过痛苦的斗争之后，才最终形成了正统信仰的定义。

In the ninth century, the Church would condemn some of Origen’s ideas as heretical. Neither Origen nor Clement believed that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), which would later become orthodox Christian doctrine. Origen’s view of the divinity of Jesus and the salvation of humanity certainly did not conform to later official Christian teaching: he did not believe that we had been “saved” by the death of Christ, but that we ascended to God under our own steam. The point is that when Origen and Clement were writing and teaching their Christian Platonism there was no official doctrine. Nobody knew for certain if God had created the world or how a human being had been divine. The turbulent events of the fourth and fifth centuries would lead to a definition of orthodox belief only after an agonizing struggle.

奥利金最广为人知的或许是他的自阉行为。福音书中记载，耶稣曾说有些人为了天国的缘故自阉，奥利金对此深信不疑。阉割在古代晚期相当普遍；奥利金并非急于用刀自阉，他的决定也并非出于某些西方神学家（例如圣杰罗姆（342-420））那种神经质的性厌恶。英国学者彼得·布朗认为，这或许是奥利金试图论证其关于人类境况不确定性的教义，他认为灵魂终将超越这种不确定性。在漫长的神化过程中，诸如性别之类的看似不可改变的因素将被抛诸脑后，因为在上帝之中既无男性也无女性。在那个哲学家以长须（智慧的象征）为特征的时代，奥利金光滑的脸颊和高亢的嗓音无疑会令人感到震惊。

Origen is, perhaps, best known for his self-castration. In the Gospels, Jesus said that some people had made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Origen took him at his word. Castration was quite a common operation in late antiquity; Origen did not rush at himself with a knife, nor was his decision inspired by the kind of neurotic loathing of sexuality that would characterize some Western theologians, such as St. Jerome (342–420). The British scholar Peter Brown suggests that it may have been an attempt to demonstrate his doctrine of the indeterminacy of the human condition, which the soul must soon transcend. Apparently immutable factors such as gender would be left behind in the long process of divinization, since in God there was neither male nor female. In an age where the philosopher was characterized by his long beard (a sign of wisdom), Origen’s smooth cheeks and high voice would have been a startling sight.

普罗提诺（公元205-270年）曾在亚历山大城师从奥利金的老师阿摩尼乌斯·萨库斯，后来加入罗马军队，希望借此前往他渴望学习的印度。不幸的是，远征以失败告终，普罗提诺逃往安条克。之后，他在罗马创立了一所著名的哲学学院。我们对他的了解甚少，因为他极其沉默寡言，从不谈论自己，甚至连自己的生日都不庆祝。与塞尔苏斯一样，普罗提诺认为基督教是一种极其令人反感的信条，但他却影响了后世三大一神论宗教的信徒。因此，深入探讨他的上帝观至关重要。普罗提诺被誉为一位分水岭人物：他吸收了近800年来希腊思辨的主要思想，并以一种持续影响着我们这个世纪的关键人物（如T·S·艾略特和亨利·柏格森）的形式将其传承下来。普罗提诺借鉴柏拉图的思想，发展出一套旨在理解自我的体系。他同样对寻找宇宙的科学解释或试图解释生命的物质起源毫无兴趣；普罗提诺没有向外寻求客观解释，而是敦促他的门徒们向内探索，深入心灵的深处。

Plotinus (205–270) had studied in Alexandria under Origen’s old teacher Ammonius Saccus and had later joined the Roman army, hoping that it would take him to India, where he was anxious to study. Unfortunately the expedition came to grief and Plotinus fled to Antioch. Later he founded a prestigious school of philosophy in Rome. We know little else about him, since he was an extremely reticent man who never spoke about himself and did not even celebrate his own birthday. Like Celsus, Plotinus found Christianity a thoroughly objectionable creed, yet he influenced generations of future monotheists in all three of the God-religions. It is important, therefore, to give some detailed consideration to his vision of God. Plotinus has been described as a watershed: he had absorbed the main currents of some 800 years of Greek speculation and transmitted it in a form which has continued to influence such crucial figures in our own century as T. S. Eliot and Henri Bergson. Drawing on Plato’s ideas, Plotinus evolved a system designed to achieve an understanding of the self. Again, he was not at all interested in finding a scientific explanation of the universe or attempting to explain the physical origins of life; instead of looking outside the world for an objective explanation, Plotinus urged his disciples to withdraw into themselves and begin their exploration in the depths of the psyche.

人类意识到自身处境出了问题；他们感到与自己和他人格格不入，与内在本性脱节，迷失方向。冲突和缺乏简单性似乎……我们存在的特征在于，我们不断地寻求将纷繁的现象统一起来，并将它们简化为某种有序的整体。当我们瞥见一个人时，我们看到的不是一条腿、一条胳膊、另一条胳膊和一个头，而是自动地将这些元素组合成一个完整的人。这种对统一性的追求是我们思维运作方式的根本，普罗提诺认为，它也必然反映了事物的本质。为了找到现实的根本真理，灵魂必须重塑自身，经历一段净化（卡塔西斯）时期，并进行沉思（理论），正如柏拉图所建议的那样。它必须超越宇宙，超越感官世界，甚至超越理智的局限，才能洞察现实的核心。但这并非攀登到我们自身之外的现实，而是深入心灵最深处。可以说，这是一次向内的攀登。

Human beings are aware that something is wrong with their condition; they feel at odds with themselves and others, out of touch with their inner nature and disoriented. Conflict and a lack of simplicity seem to characterize our existence. Yet we are constantly seeking to unite the multiplicity of phenomena and reduce them to some ordered whole. When we glance at a person, we do not see a leg, an arm, another arm and a head, but automatically organize these elements into an integrated human being. This drive for unity is fundamental to the way our minds work and must, Plotinus believed, also reflect the essence of things in general. To find the underlying truth of reality, the soul must refashion itself, undergo a period of purification (katharsis) and engage in contemplation (theoria), as Plato had advised. It will have to look beyond the cosmos, beyond the sensible world and even beyond the limitations of the intellect to see into the heart of reality. This will not be an ascent to a reality outside ourselves, however, but a descent into the deepest recesses of the mind. It is, so to speak, a climb inward.

终极实在是一种原始的统一体，普罗提诺称之为“一”。万物的存在都源于这一强大的实在。因为“一”本身就是纯粹，所以无法对其进行描述：它没有任何与其本质相分离的属性，因此无法进行日常的描述。它只是存在。因此，“一”是无名的：“如果我们对‘一’抱有积极的看法，”普罗提诺解释道，“那么‘沉默’本身就蕴含着更多的真理。” ⁴⁶我们甚至不能说它存在，因为作为存在本身，“它并非事物，而是与万物截然不同。” ⁴⁷ 事实上，普罗提诺解释说，它“既是一切，又是虚无；它不可能是任何存在的事物，但它又是一切。” ⁴⁸我们将看到，这种认知将是上帝历史中一个永恒的主题。

The ultimate reality was a primal unity, which Plotinus called the One. All things owe their existence to this potent reality. Because the One is simplicity itself, there was nothing to say about it: it had no qualities distinct from its essence that would make ordinary description possible. It just was. Consequently, the One is nameless: “If we are to think positively of the One,” Plotinus explained, “there would be more truth in Silence.”⁴⁶ We cannot even say that it exists, since as Being itself, it is “not a thing but is distinct from all things.”⁴⁷ Indeed, Plotinus explained, it “is Everything and Nothing; it can be none of the existing things, and yet it is all.”⁴⁸ We shall see that this perception will be a constant theme in the history of God.

但普罗提诺认为，这种沉默不可能是全部真相，因为我们能够获得一些关于神性的知识。如果“一”始终笼罩在它那不可穿透的晦涩之中，这是不可能的。“一”必定超越了自身，超越了它的单纯性，才能使我们这些不完美的存在能够理解它。这种神圣的超越可以被恰当地描述为“狂喜”，因为它是一种纯粹慷慨的“超越自我”：“一不求，不占有，不缺乏，它是完美的，并且，用比喻来说，它已经满溢，它的丰盈创造了新的事物。” ⁴⁹这一切中没有任何个人色彩；普罗提诺认为“一”超越了所有人类的范畴，包括人格的范畴。他重拾古老的流溢神话，用以解释万物如何从这至简至纯的源头辐射而出。他运用诸多比喻来描述这一过程：如同太阳发出的光芒，或是火焰散发的热量，越靠近炽热的中心越温暖。普罗提诺最喜爱的比喻之一，便是将“一”比作中心点。圆周运动蕴含着所有可能由此衍生的未来圆周运动的可能性。这类似于向水池中投入石子所产生的涟漪效应。与《埃努玛·埃利什》等神话中神祇的演化不同——在这些神话中，每一对相互演化的神祇都变得更加完美和强大——普罗提诺的体系恰恰相反。如同诺斯替神话中所描述的那样，一个存在离其源头——“一”——越远，它就越虚弱。

But this Silence cannot be the whole truth, Plotinus argued, since we are able to arrive at some knowledge of the divine. This would be impossible if the One had remained shrouded in its impenetrable obscurity. The One must have transcended itself, gone beyond its Simplicity in order to make itself apprehensible to imperfect beings like ourselves. This divine transcendence could be described as “ecstasy” properly so called, since it is a “going out of the self” in pure generosity: “Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new.”⁴⁹ There was nothing personal in all this; Plotinus saw the One as beyond all human categories, including that of personality. He returned to the ancient myth of emanation to explain the radiation of all that exists from this utterly simple Source, using a number of analogies to describe this process: it was like a light shining from the sun or the heat that radiates from a fire and becomes warmer as you draw nearer to its blazing core. One of Plotinus’s favorite similes was the comparison of the One to the point at the center of a circle, which contained the possibility of all the future circles that could derive from it. It was similar to the ripple effect achieved by dropping a stone into a pool. Unlike the emanations in a myth such as the Enuma Elish, where each pair of gods that evolved from one another became more perfect and effective, the opposite was the case in Plotinus’s scheme. As in the Gnostic myths, the further a being got from its source in the One, the weaker it became.

普罗提诺认为从“一”散发出的前两个流溢是神圣的，因为它们使我们能够认识并参与神的生命。它们与“一”共同构成了神性的三位一体，这在某些方面接近于基督教最终的三位一体论。“心灵”（nous），作为第一个流溢，在普罗提诺的体系中对应于柏拉图的理念领域：它使“一”的纯粹性变得可理解，但这里的知识是直觉的、直接的。它并非通过费力的研究和推理过程获得，而是像我们的感官吸收所感知的事物一样被吸收。“灵魂”（psyche）以与“一”相同的方式从“心灵”散发出来，它离完美稍远一些，在这个领域中，知识只能通过论述获得，因此它缺乏绝对的纯粹性和连贯性。灵魂对应于我们所知的现实：一切物质和精神的存在都源于灵魂，灵魂赋予我们的世界一切的统一性和连贯性。再次强调，普罗提诺并非将“一”、“心智”和“灵魂”这三位一体设想为“外在的”神。神性包含了整个存在。神是万物之源，而其他存在只有在参与到“一”的绝对存在之中时才得以存在^。50

Plotinus regarded the first two emanations to radiate from the One as divine, since they enabled us to know and to participate in the life of God. Together with the One, they formed a Triad of divinity which was in some ways close to the final Christian solution of the Trinity. Mind (nous), the first emanation, corresponded in Plotinus’s scheme to Plato’s realm of ideas: it made the simplicity of the One intelligible, but knowledge here was intuitive and immediate. It was not laboriously acquired through research and reasoning processes but was absorbed in rather the same way as our senses drink in the objects they perceive. Soul (psyche), which emanates from Mind in the same way as Mind emanates from the One, is a little further from perfection, and in this realm knowledge can only be acquired discursively, so that it lacks absolute simplicity and coherence. Soul corresponds to reality as we know it: all the rest of physical and spiritual existence emanates from Soul, which gives to our world whatever unity and coherence it possesses. Again, it must be emphasized that Plotinus did not envisage this trinity of One, Mind and Soul as a god “out there.” The divine comprised the whole of existence. God was all in all, and lesser beings only existed insofar as they participated in the absolute being of the One.⁵⁰

向外散发的能量流被回归“一”的相应运动所阻断。正如我们从自身心智的运作以及对冲突和多样性的不满中所了解到的，所有众生都渴望合一；他们渴望回归“一”。这并非上升到外在的现实，而是下降到心灵深处。灵魂必须重新忆起它已遗忘的纯真，回归其真我。由于所有灵魂都由同一实在所赋予生命，人类可以比作围绕指挥的合唱团。如果其中任何一个人分心，就会出现不和谐和不和谐，但如果所有人都转向指挥并专注于他，整个群体都会受益，因为“他们会如实歌唱，真正与他同在。” ⁵¹

The outward flow of emanation was arrested by a corresponding movement of return to the One. As we know from the workings of our own minds and our dissatisfaction with conflict and multiplicity, all beings yearn for unity; they long to return to the One. Again, this is not an ascent to an external reality but an interior descent into the depths of the mind. The soul must recollect the simplicity it has forgotten and return to its true self. Since all souls were animated by the same Reality, humanity could be compared to a chorus standing around a conductor. If any one individual were distracted, there would be dissonance and disharmony, but if all turned toward the conductor and concentrated on him, the whole community would benefit, since “they would sing as they ought, and really be with him.”⁵¹

“一”是完全非人格化的；它没有性别，也完全忽略我们。同样，“心智”（nous）在语法上是阳性，“灵魂”（psyche）也是如此。女性特质，这或许表明普罗提诺希望保留古老的异教性平衡与和谐观念。与圣经中的上帝不同，它不会降临与我们相遇，也不会指引我们回家。它既不渴望我们，也不爱我们，更不会向我们显现自身。它对自身之外的事物一无所知。 ⁵²然而，人类的灵魂偶尔也会沉浸在对“一”的狂喜领悟之中。普罗提诺的哲学并非逻辑推演，而是一场精神探索：

The One is strictly impersonal; it has no gender and is entirely oblivious of us. Similarly Mind (nous) is grammatically masculine and Soul (psyche) feminine, which could show a desire on Plotinus’s part to preserve the old pagan vision of sexual balance and harmony. Unlike the biblical God, it does not come out to meet us and guide us home. It does not yearn toward us, or love us, or reveal itself to us. It has no knowledge of anything beyond itself.⁵² Nevertheless, the human soul was occasionally rapt in ecstatic apprehension of the One. Plotinus’s philosophy was not a logical process but a spiritual quest:

这位神并非异己之物，而是我们最美好的自我。它“既非通过认知，也非通过发现理智存在（存在于心灵或努斯之中）的理性，而是通过一种超越一切知识的临在（parousia）而来。” ⁵⁴

This god was not an alien object but our best self. It comes “neither by knowing, nor by Intellection that discovers the Intellectual beings [in the Mind or nous] but by a presence (parousia) overpassing all knowledge.”⁵⁴

在柏拉图思想盛行的时代，基督教逐渐发展壮大。此后，当基督教思想家试图解释自身的宗教体验时，他们自然而然地转向了普罗提诺及其后世异教门徒的新柏拉图主义观点。这种超越人格范畴、非人格化的、人类与生俱来的启蒙理念，也与普罗提诺曾热衷研究的印度教和佛教的理想十分接近。因此，尽管存在一些表面上的差异，一神论与其他现实观之间却存在着深刻的相似之处。似乎当人类思考绝对真理时，他们拥有非常相似的观念和体验。面对被称为涅槃、一、梵或神的现实时，那种临在感、狂喜和敬畏之情，似乎是一种人类自然而然、永无止境追求的心灵状态和感知。

Christianity was coming into its own in a world where Platonic ideas predominated. Thereafter, when Christian thinkers tried to explain their own religious experience, they turned naturally to the Neoplatonic vision of Plotinus and his later pagan disciples. The notion of an enlightenment that was impersonal, beyond human categories and natural to humanity was also close to the Hindu and Buddhist ideal in India, where Plotinus had been so keen to study. Thus despite the more superficial differences, there were profound similarities between the monotheistic and other visions of reality. It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality—called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God—seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings.

一些基督徒决心与希腊世界交好，而另一些人则完全不愿与之有任何瓜葛。公元170年代，在一场迫害爆发期间，一位名叫蒙塔努斯的新先知在今土耳其的弗里吉亚兴起，他自称是神的化身。“我是全能的上帝，降生为人，”他常常这样宣称，“我是父，我是子，我是保惠师。”他的同伴普里西拉和马克西米拉也做出了类似的宣称。蒙塔努斯主义是一种激烈的末世论信条，它描绘了^一幅……这是一种令人恐惧的上帝形象。它的信徒不仅被迫背弃世俗，过着独身生活，而且还被告知殉道是通往上帝的唯一可靠途径。他们为信仰而遭受的痛苦死亡将加速基督的降临：殉道者是上帝的战士，与邪恶势力作战。这种可怕的信条迎合了基督教精神中潜藏的极端主义：蒙坦主义在弗里吉亚、色雷斯、叙利亚和高卢迅速蔓延。它在北非尤其盛行，因为那里的人们习惯于信奉需要活人献祭的神灵。他们对巴力的崇拜，需要献祭长子，直到二世纪才被皇帝镇压。很快，这种异端邪说就吸引了拉丁教会的首席神学家特土良的关注。在东方，克莱门特和奥利金宣扬和平喜乐地回归上帝，但在西方教会，一位更加令人恐惧的上帝却要求以惨烈的死亡作为救赎的条件。当时，基督教在西欧和北非正处于艰难发展阶段，并且从一开始就带有极端主义和严苛的倾向。

Some Christians were determined to make friends with the Greek world. Others wanted nothing whatever to do with it. During an outbreak of persecution in the 170s, a new prophet called Montanus arose in Phrygia in modern Turkey, who claimed to be a divine avatar. “I am the Lord God Almighty, who descended to a man,” he used to cry; “I am Father, son and Paraclete.” His companions Priscilla and Maximilla made similar claims.⁵⁵ Montanism was a fierce apocalyptic creed which painted a fearsome portrait of God. Not only were its adherents obliged to turn their backs upon the world and lead celibate lives, but they were told that martyrdom was the only sure path to God. Their agonizing death for the faith would hasten the coming of Christ: the martyrs were soldiers of God engaged in a battle with the forces of evil. This terrible creed appealed to a latent extremism in the Christian spirit: Montanism spread like wildfire in Phrygia, Thrace, Syria and Gaul. It was particularly strong in North Africa, where the people were used to gods who demanded human sacrifice. Their cult of Baal, which had entailed the sacrifice of the firstborn, had been suppressed by the emperor only during the second century. Soon the heresy had attracted no less a person than Tertullian, the leading theologian of the Latin Church. In the East, Clement and Origen preached a peaceful, joyous return to God, but in the Western Church a more frightening God demanded hideous death as a condition of salvation. At this stage, Christianity was a struggling religion in Western Europe and North Africa, and from the start there was a tendency toward extremism and rigor.

然而，在东方，基督教发展迅猛，到公元235年，它已成为罗马帝国最重要的宗教之一。基督徒们谈论着一个伟大的教会，它拥有单一的信仰准则，摒弃极端和怪诞。这些正统神学家们取缔了诺斯替派、马西昂派和孟他努派的悲观观点，选择了中间道路。基督教逐渐成为一种文明的信条，它摒弃了神秘宗教的复杂性和僵化的禁欲主义。它开始吸引那些能够以希腊罗马世界能够理解的方式发展信仰的高智商人士。这种新兴宗教也吸引了女性：它的经文教导说，在基督里既无男性也无女性，并坚持认为男人要像基督爱他的教会一样爱他们的妻子。基督教拥有犹太教曾经如此吸引人的所有优点，却没有割礼和外来律法的弊端。异教徒尤其对教会建立的福利制度以及基督徒彼此间的仁慈行为印象深刻。在漫长的生存斗争中，教会既要应对外部的迫害，又要应对内部的纷争，在此过程中，教会也发展出一套高效的组织架构，几乎成为帝国本身的缩影：它多元种族、包容天主教、国际化、普世合一，并由高效的官僚机构管理。

Yet in the East Christianity was making great strides, and by 235 it had become one of the most important religions of the Roman empire. Christians now spoke of a Great Church with a single rule of faith that shunned extremity and eccentricity. These orthodox theologians had outlawed the pessimistic visions of the Gnostics, Marcionites and Montanists and had settled for the middle road. Christianity was becoming an urbane creed that eschewed the complexities of the mystery cults and an inflexible asceticism. It was beginning to appeal to highly intelligent men who were able to develop the faith along lines that the Greco-Roman world could understand. The new religion also appealed to women: its scriptures taught that in Christ there was neither male nor female and insisted that men cherished their wives as Christ cherished his church. Christianity had all the advantages that had once made Judaism such an attractive faith without the disadvantages of circumcision and an alien Law. Pagans were particularly impressed by the welfare system that the churches had established and by the compassionate behavior of Christians toward one another. During its long struggle to survive persecution from without and dissension from within, the Church had also evolved an efficient organization that made it almost a microcosm of the empire itself: it was multiracial, catholic, international, ecumenical and administered by efficient bureaucrats.

因此，它成为一股稳定的力量，并吸引了君士坦丁大帝的注意。君士坦丁大帝本人在米尔维安战役后皈依了基督教。公元312年，君士坦丁大帝在布里奇（今罗马帝国境内）颁布法令，次年基督教合法化。基督徒从此可以拥有财产、自由敬拜，并​​在公共生活中做出独特的贡献。尽管异教在接下来的两个世纪里依然盛行，但基督教最终成为帝国的国教，并开始吸引新的皈依者，他们为了物质上的进步而加入教会。不久之后，这个最初受迫害、恳求宽容的教派，开始要求人们遵守其自身的法律和信条。基督教胜利的原因至今仍不甚明了；如果没有罗马帝国的支持，它肯定无法取得成功，尽管这种支持也必然带来了自身的问题。基督教本质上是一种逆境中的宗教，在繁荣时期从未达到其最佳状态。需要解决的首要问题之一便是上帝的教义：君士坦丁大帝刚为教会带来和平，新的危险便从内部出现，将基督徒分裂成激烈交战的阵营。

As such it had become a force for stability and appealed to the emperor Constantine, who became a Christian himself after the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, and legalized Christianity the following year. Christians were now able to own property, worship freely and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Even though paganism flourished for another two centuries, Christianity became the state religion of the empire and began to attract new converts who made their way into the Church for the sake of material advancement. Soon the Church, which had begun life as a persecuted sect pleading for toleration, would demand conformity to its own laws and creeds. The reasons for the triumph of Christianity are obscure; it certainly would not have succeeded without the support of the Roman empire, though this inevitably brought its own problems. Supremely a religion of adversity, it has never been at its best in prosperity. One of the first problems that had to be solved was the doctrine of God: no sooner had Constantine brought peace to the Church than a new danger arose from within which split Christians into bitterly warring camps.

4

三位一体：基督教的上帝

4

Trinity: The Christian God

我大约公元320年，一场激烈的神学争论席卷了埃及、叙利亚和小亚细亚的教会。水手和旅行者们吟唱着各种流行小调，宣称只有圣父才是真神，祂不可接近，独一无二；而圣子既非与圣父同永，也非非受造，因为祂的生命和存在都来自圣父。我们听说，一位浴场侍者向沐浴者们慷慨陈词，坚称圣子来自虚无；一位兑换钱币的人在被问及汇率时，先长篇大论地阐述了受造界与非受造之神之间的区别；还有一位面包师告诉顾客，圣父比圣子更伟大。人们讨论这些深奥的问题，其热情丝毫不亚于今天讨论足球。^这场争论是由亚历山大一位魅力非凡、相貌英俊的长老阿里乌斯引发的，他嗓音柔和而富有感染力，面容却透着一丝忧郁。他提出了一个令主教亚历山大无法忽视却更难反驳的挑战：耶稣基督怎能与圣父同等地成为神？阿里乌斯并非否认基督的神性；事实上，他称耶稣为“大能的神”和“完全的神” ^²，但他认为认为耶稣生来就是神是亵渎神明的：耶稣曾明确说过，圣父比他更大。亚历山大和他才华横溢的年轻助手亚他那修立刻意识到，这绝非无关紧要的神学争论。阿里乌斯提出的问题是关乎神性本质的根本问题。与此同时，阿里乌斯这位善于宣传的领袖，巧妙地将自己的观点包装成引人入胜的宣传，很快，信徒们也像主教们一样，热烈地讨论起这个问题来。

IN ABOUT 320 a fierce theological passion had seized the churches of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Sailors and travelers were singing versions of popular ditties that proclaimed that the Father alone was true God, inaccessible and unique, but that the Son was neither coeternal nor uncreated, since he received life and being from the Father. We hear of a bath attendant who harangued the bathers, insisting that the Son came from nothingness, of a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, prefaced his reply with a long disquisition on the distinction between the created order and the uncreated God, and of a baker who informed his customer that the Father was greater than the Son. People were discussing these abstruse questions with the same enthusiasm as they discuss football today.¹ The controversy had been kindled by Arius, a charismatic and handsome presbyter of Alexandria, who had a soft, impressive voice and a strikingly melancholy face. He had issued a challenge which his bishop, Alexander, found impossible to ignore but even more difficult to rebut: how could Jesus Christ have been God in the same way as God the Father? Arius was not denying the divinity of Christ; indeed, he called Jesus “strong God” and “full God,”² but he argued that it was blasphemous to think that he was divine by nature: Jesus had specifically said that the Father was greater than he. Alexander and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that this was no mere theological nicety. Arius was asking vital questions about the nature of God. In the meantime, Arius, a skillful propagandist, had set his ideas to music, and soon the laity were debating the issue as passionately as their bishops.

这场争论愈演愈烈，以至于君士坦丁大帝亲自介入，召集了在今土耳其境内的尼西亚召开宗教会议来解决此事。如今，阿里乌斯的名字已成为异端的代名词，但在冲突爆发之时，并没有官方的正统立场，阿里乌斯究竟错在哪里，甚至他是否错了，都远未可知。他的观点并非什么新鲜事：双方都高度敬重的奥利金也曾教导过类似的教义。然而，自奥利金时代以来，亚历山大的思想氛围已经发生了变化，人们不再相信柏拉图的上帝能够与圣经中的上帝完美契合。例如，阿里乌斯、亚历山大和亚他那修等人开始相信一种会让任何柏拉图主义者都感到震惊的教义：他们认为上帝从无到有（ex nihilo）创造了世界，并将此观点建立在圣经之上。事实上，《创世记》并没有做出这样的宣告。祭司作者暗示上帝从原始混沌中创造了世界，而上帝从绝对真空中召唤出整个宇宙的观念则是全新的。这与希腊思想格格不入，也并非克莱门特和奥利金等神学家所传授的，他们坚持柏拉图的流溢论。但到了四世纪，基督徒开始认同诺斯替主义的观点，认为世界本质上是脆弱不堪、不完美的，与上帝之间隔着一道巨大的鸿沟。新的“无中生有”的创造论强调了宇宙的这种本质脆弱，其存在和生命完全依赖于上帝。上帝与人类不再像希腊思想中那样是亲缘关系。上帝从深渊般的虚无中召唤出每一个生命，并且随时可以收回他维系万物的手。不再存在一条永恒地从上帝流溢而出的伟大生命链；也不再存在一个由灵性存在组成的中间世界，将神圣的玛那传递给世界。男人和女人再也无法凭借自身努力攀登存在的阶梯，最终抵达神的面前。只有当初将他们从虚无中创造出来，并使他们永恒存在的神，才能确保他们获得永恒的救赎。

The controversy became so heated that the emperor Constantine himself intervened and summoned a synod to Nicaea in modern Turkey to settle the issue. Today Arius’s name is a byword for heresy, but when the conflict broke out there was no officially orthodox position and it was by no means certain why or even whether Arius was wrong. There was nothing new about his claim: Origen, whom both sides held in high esteem, had taught a similar doctrine. Yet the intellectual climate in Alexandria had changed since Origen’s day, and people were no longer convinced that the God of Plato could be successfully wedded with the God of the Bible. Arius, Alexander and Athanasius, for example, had come to believe a doctrine that would have startled any Platonist: they considered that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), basing their opinion on scripture. In fact, Genesis had not made this claim. The Priestly author had implied that God had created the world out of the primordial chaos, and the notion that God had summoned the whole universe from an absolute vacuum was entirely new. It was alien to Greek thought and had not been taught by such theologians as Clement and Origen, who had held to the Platonic scheme of emanation. But by the fourth century, Christians shared the Gnostic view of the world as inherently fragile and imperfect, separated from God by a vast chasm. The new doctrine of creation ex nihilo emphasized this view of the cosmos as quintessentially frail and utterly dependent upon God for being and life. God and humanity were no longer akin, as in Greek thought. God had summoned every single being from an abysmal nothingness, and at any moment he could withdraw his sustaining hand. There was no longer a great chain of being emanating eternally from God; there was no longer an intermediate world of spiritual beings who transmitted the divine mana to the world. Men and women could no longer ascend the chain of being to God by their own efforts. Only the God who had drawn them from nothingness in the first place and kept them perpetually in being could ensure their eternal salvation.

基督徒们知道，耶稣基督以他的死和复活拯救了他们；他们从灭亡中被救赎，终有一天将与神同在，因为神就是存在和生命本身。基督以某种方式使他们能够跨越神与人之间的鸿沟。问题是，他是如何做到的？他究竟在鸿沟的哪一边？如今，不再存在一个“圆满之地”（Pleroma），一个由中介和永恒构成的丰盛之所。基督，即道，要么属于神圣的领域（如今这领域只属于神），要么属于脆弱的受造秩序。阿里乌斯和亚他那修将他置于对立面。鸿沟的两边：阿塔纳修斯在神圣世界，阿里乌斯在受造秩序。

Christians knew that Jesus Christ had saved them by his death and resurrection; they had been redeemed from extinction and would one day share the existence of God, who was Being and Life itself. Somehow Christ had enabled them to cross the gulf that separated God from humanity. The question was how had he done it? On which side of the Great Divide was he? There was now no longer a Pleroma, a Place of Fullness of intermediaries and aeons. Either Christ, the Word, belonged to the divine realm (which was now the domain of God alone) or he belonged to the fragile created order. Arius and Athanasius put him on opposite sides of the gulf: Athanasius in the divine world and Arius in the created order.

阿里乌斯想要强调独一无二的上帝与他所有受造物之间的本质区别。正如他在写给亚历山大主教的信中所说，上帝是“唯一未受生的，唯一永恒的，唯一无始的，唯一真实的，唯一拥有永生的，唯一智慧的，唯一良善的，唯一全能的”。 ³ 阿里乌斯精通圣经，他引用了大量经文来支持他的论点，即道成肉身的基督只能像我们一样是受造物。其中一段关键经文是《箴言》中对神圣智慧的描述，其中明确指出上帝在起初就创造了智慧。 ⁴这段经文还指出，智慧是创造的主体，这一观点在《约翰福音》的序言中也有所体现。道在起初就与上帝同在：

Arius wanted to emphasize the essential difference between the unique God and all his creatures. As he wrote to Bishop Alexander, God was “the only unbegotten, the only eternal, the only one without beginning, the only true, the only one who has immortality, the only wise, the only good, the only potentate.”³ Arius knew the scriptures well, and he produced an armory of texts to support his claim that Christ the Word could only be a creature like ourselves. A key passage was the description of the divine Wisdom in Proverbs, which stated explicitly that God had created Wisdom at the very beginning.⁴ This text also stated that Wisdom had been the agent of creation, an idea repeated in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. The Word had been with God in the beginning:

道（逻各斯）是上帝创造其他受造物的工具。因此，它与所有其他受造物截然不同，地位极其崇高；但由于道是由上帝创造的，它本质上与上帝本身也不同，二者有所区别。

The Logos had been the instrument used by God to call other creatures into existence. It was, therefore, entirely different from all other beings and of exceptionally high status, but because it had been created by God, the Logos was essentially different and distinct from God himself.

圣约翰明确指出耶稣就是道（逻各斯）；他还说道就是神。^然而，阿里乌斯坚持认为，耶稣并非生来就是神，而是被神提升到了神圣的地位。他与我们不同，因为神直接创造了他，而万物都是通过他创造的。神预见到道成为人后会完全顺服神，可以说，神预先赋予了耶稣神性。但耶稣的神性并非与生俱来，而是一种奖赏或恩赐。阿里乌斯再次引用了许多经文来支持他的观点。耶稣称神为“父”这一事实本身就暗示了一种区别；父子关系本质上包含着先于父的存在，以及对子的一种优越性。阿里乌斯还强调了圣经中那些强调基督谦卑和脆弱的段落。阿里乌斯并没有像他的敌人所声称的那样贬低耶稣。他崇敬基督的德行和至死不渝的顺服，认为正是这些确保了我们的救赎。阿里乌斯的上帝与希腊哲学家们的上帝相似，既遥远又完全超越尘世；同样，他也秉持着希腊式的救赎观。例如，斯多葛学派一直教导说，品德高尚的人有可能成神；这在柏拉图的观点中也至关重要。阿里乌斯对此深信不疑。基督徒蒙恩得救，成为神，分享神的性情。这唯有耶稣为我们开辟道路才成为可能。他过着完美的人的生活；他顺服神，甚至死在十字架上；正如圣保罗所说，正是因为他这至死的顺服，神才将他提升到特别崇高的地位，并赐予他“主”（ kyrios）的神圣称号。 ⁷如果耶稣不是人，我们就没有盼望。如果他本性就是神，他的一生就没有任何功德，也就没有我们可以效法的榜样。基督徒唯有默想基督完全顺服的神子身份，才能成为神。通过效法基督这位完美的受造物，他们也能成为“神所造的永不改变、永不改变的完美受造物”。 ⁸

St. John made it clear that Jesus was the Logos; he also said that the Logos was God.⁶ Yet he was not God by nature, Arius insisted, but had been promoted by God to divine status. He was different from the rest of us, because God had created him directly but all other things through him. God had foreseen that when the Logos became man he would obey him perfectly and had, so to speak, conferred divinity upon Jesus in advance. But Jesus’ divinity was not natural to him: it was only a reward or gift. Again, Arius could produce many texts that seemed to support his view. The very fact that Jesus had called God his “Father” implied a distinction; paternity by its very nature involves prior existence and a certain superiority over the son. Arius also emphasized the biblical passages that stressed the humility and vulnerability of Christ. Arius had no intention of denigrating Jesus, as his enemies claimed. He had a lofty notion of Christ’s virtue and obedience unto death, which had ensured our salvation. Arius’s God was close to the God of the Greek philosophers, remote and utterly transcending the world; so too he adhered to a Greek concept of salvation. The Stoics, for example, had always taught that it was possible for a virtuous human being to become divine; this had also been essential to the Platonic view. Arius passionately believed that Christians had been saved and made divine, sharers in the nature of God. This was only possible because Jesus had blazed a trail for us. He had lived a perfect human life; he had obeyed God even unto the death of the Cross; as St. Paul said, it was because of this obedience unto death that God had raised him up to a specially exalted status and given him the divine title of Lord (kyrios).⁷ If Jesus had not been a human being, there would be no hope for us. There would have been nothing meritorious in his life if he had been God by nature, nothing for us to imitate. It was by contemplating Christ’s life of perfectly obedient sonship that Christians would become divine themselves. By imitating Christ, the perfect creature, they too would become “unalterable and unchangeable, perfect creature[s] of God.”⁸

但亚他那修对人类认识神的能力却持较为悲观的看法。他认为人类天生脆弱：我们来自虚无，又因犯罪而堕落回虚无。因此，当他思考自己的创造时，神

But Athanasius had a less optimistic view of man’s capacity for God. He saw humanity as inherently fragile: we had come from nothing and had fallen back into nothingness when we had sinned. When he contemplated his creation, therefore, God

唯有藉着道成肉身，与神同在，人才能免于灭亡，因为唯有神是完美的存在。若道本身是脆弱的受造物，祂便无法拯救人类免于灭绝。道成肉身是为了赐予我们生命。祂降临到充满死亡和腐朽的凡世，是为了让我们分享神的无情和永生。然而，若道本身是脆弱的受造物，随时可能回归虚无，那么这救赎便无从谈起。唯有创造世界的那一位才能拯救世界，这意味着道成肉身的基督，必定与父同性。正如亚他那修所说，道成为人，是为了使我们成为神^。

It was only by participating in God, through his Logos, that man could avoid annihilation because God alone was perfect Being. If the Logos himself were a vulnerable creature, he would not be able to save mankind from extinction. The Logos had been made flesh to give us life. He had descended into the mortal world of death and corruption in order to give us a share of God’s impassibility and immortality. But this salvation would have been impossible if the Logos himself had been a frail creature, who could himself lapse back into nothingness. Only he who had created the world could save it, and that meant that Christ, the Logos made flesh, must be of the same nature as the Father. As Athanasius said, the Word became man in order that we could become divine.¹⁰

公元325年5月20日，主教们齐聚尼西亚，试图解决危机。当时，很少有人认同亚他那修对基督的看法。大多数人的立场介于亚他那修和阿里乌之间。然而，亚他那修成功地将自己的神学强加于与会代表，在皇帝的施压下，只有阿里乌和他的两位勇敢的同伴拒绝签署他的信条。这使得“无中生有”的教义得以确立。这是基督教官方教义首次明确指出，基督并非仅仅是受造物或永恒存在。创造者和救赎者是一体的。

When the bishops gathered at Nicaea on May 20, 325, to resolve the crisis, very few would have shared Athanasius’s view of Christ. Most held a position midway between Athanasius and Arius. Nevertheless, Athanasius managed to impose his theology on the delegates and, with the emperor breathing down their necks, only Arius and two of his brave companions refused to sign his Creed. This made creation ex nihilo an official Christian doctrine for the first time, insisting that Christ was no mere creature or aeon. The Creator and Redeemer were one.

君士坦丁对表面上的和解感到满意，尽管他对神学问题一窍不通，但实际上尼西亚会议并未达成一致。会议结束后，主教们继续沿用之前的教导方式，阿里乌斯危机又持续了六十年。阿里乌斯及其追随者奋起反抗，最终重新获得了皇帝的青睐。亚他那修被流放了不下五次。他的信条很难被广泛接受。尤其是“同质”（ homoousion，字面意思是“由同一种物质制成”）一词，由于它不符合圣经教义且带有物质主义色彩，因此极具争议。例如，两枚铜币可以说都是“同质的” ，因为它们都源自同一种物质。

The show of agreement pleased Constantine, who had no understanding of the theological issues, but in fact there was no unanimity at Nicaea. After the council, the bishops went on teaching as they had before, and the Arian crisis continued for another sixty years. Arius and his followers fought back and managed to regain imperial favor. Athanasius was exiled no fewer than five times. It was very difficult to make his creed stick. In particular the term homoousion (literally, “made of the same stuff”) was highly controversial because it was unscriptural and had materialistic association. Thus two copper coins could be said to be homoousion, because both derived from the same substance.

此外，亚他那修的信条也引出了许多重要问题。它宣称耶稣是神，但没有解释道（逻各斯）如何能成为神。与圣父“本质相同”，却并非第二个神。公元339年，安西拉主教马塞勒斯——阿塔纳修斯的忠实朋友和同事，甚至曾与他一同流亡——提出道不可能是永恒的神性存在。他只是上帝内在的一种属性或潜能：就当时的状况而言，尼西亚信经的教义可以被指责为三神论，即认为存在三个神：圣父、圣子和圣灵。马塞勒斯用折衷的词语“同质”（homoousion ）代替了颇具争议的“同质”（homoousion），意为“性质相似”。这场辩论的曲折过程常常招致嘲笑，尤其是吉本，他认为基督教的合一竟然会因为一个双元音而受到威胁，这简直荒谬至极。然而，令人瞩目的是，基督徒们始终坚持认为基督的神性至关重要，即便这在概念上难以表达。与马塞勒斯一样，许多基督徒也对神圣合一性受到威胁感到担忧。马塞勒斯似乎认为道（逻各斯）只是一个过渡阶段：它在创世之初从上帝而出，在耶稣身上道成肉身，并在救赎完成后，回归神性，使独一的上帝成为万有之主。

Further, Athanasius’s creed begged many important questions. It stated that Jesus was divine but did not explain how the Logos could be “of the same stuff” as the Father without being a second God. In 339 Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra—a loyal friend and colleague of Athanasius, who had even gone into exile with him on one occasion—argued that the Logos could not possibly be an eternal divine being. He was only a quality or potential inherent within God: as it stood, the Nicene formula could be accused of tritheism, the belief that there were three gods: Father, Son and Spirit. Instead of the controversial homoousion, Marcellus proposed the compromise term homoiousion, of like or similar nature. The tortuous nature of this debate has often excited ridicule, notably by Gibbon, who found it absurd that Christian unity should have been threatened by a mere diphthong. What is remarkable, however, is the tenacity with which Christians held on to their sense that the divinity of Christ was essential, even though it was so difficult to formulate in conceptual terms. Like Marcellus, many Christians were troubled by the threat to the divine unity. Marcellus seems to have believed that the Logos was only a passing phase: it had emerged from God at the creation, had become incarnate in Jesus and, when the redemption was complete, would melt back into the divine nature, so that the One God would be all in all.

最终，亚他那修说服了马塞勒斯和他的门徒们联合起来，因为他们彼此之间的共同点远多于与阿里乌斯派的共同点。那些认为道与父本质相同的人，以及那些认为道与父本质相似的人，都是“弟兄，我们意思相同，只是在术语上存在分歧”。 ¹²首要任务是反对阿里乌斯，他宣称圣子与上帝完全不同，本质上也截然不同。在外人看来，这些神学论证无疑是浪费时间：没有人能够确凿地证明任何事情，这场争论最终只会造成分裂。然而，对于参与者而言，这并非一场枯燥的辩论，而是关乎基督教信仰的本质。阿里乌斯、亚他那修和马塞勒斯都确信，耶稣的到来带来了新的事物，他们正努力用概念符号来阐明这种信仰，以便向自己和他人解释。这些文字只能是象征性的，因为它们所指涉的现实是无法言喻的。然而不幸的是，一种教条式的偏执正在基督教中悄然滋生，最终使得采用“正确”或正统的符号变得至关重要且势在必行。这种基督教独有的教义执念很容易导致人们混淆人为的符号和神圣的现实。基督教始终是一种充满悖论的信仰：早期基督徒强烈的宗教体验他们克服了对被钉十字架的弥赛亚这一丑闻的意识形态上的反对。如今在尼西亚，教会选择了接受道成肉身的悖论，尽管这显然与一神论相悖。

Eventually Athanasius was able to convince Marcellus and his disciples that they should join forces, because they had more in common with one another than with the Arians. Those who said that the Logos was of the same nature as the Father and those who believed that he was similar in nature to the Father were “brethren, who mean what we mean and are disputing only about terminology.”¹² The priority must be to oppose Arius, who declared that the Son was entirely distinct from God and of a fundamentally different nature. To an outsider, these theological arguments inevitably seem a waste of time: nobody could possibly prove anything definitively, one way or the other, and the dispute proved to be simply divisive. However, for the participants, this was no arid debate but concerned the nature of the Christian experience. Arius, Athanasius and Marcellus were all convinced that something new had come into the world with Jesus, and they were struggling to articulate this experience in conceptual symbols to explain it to themselves and to others. The words could only be symbolic, because the realities to which they pointed were ineffable. Unfortunately, however, a dogmatic intolerance was creeping into Christianity, which would ultimately make the adoption of the “correct” or orthodox symbols crucial and obligatory. This doctrinal obsession, unique to Christianity, could easily lead to a confusion between the human symbol and the divine reality. Christianity had always been a paradoxical faith: the powerful religious experience of the early Christians had overcome their ideological objections to the scandal of a crucified Messiah. Now at Nicaea the Church had opted for the paradox of the Incarnation, despite its apparent incompatibility with monotheism.

在《安东尼传》中，阿塔纳修斯试图展现这位著名的沙漠苦行僧的新教义如何影响基督教灵修。安东尼被誉为修道主义之父，曾在埃及沙漠中过着极其清苦的生活。然而，在早期沙漠修士的匿名格言集《教父箴言》中，他却被描绘成一个有血有肉、脆弱易感的人，饱受无聊的困扰，为人类的种种问题而苦恼，并给出简单直接的建议。但在阿塔纳修斯的传记中，他却以截然不同的视角来呈现安东尼。例如，他被塑造成阿里乌教派的坚定反对者；他似乎已经开始预尝未来神化的滋味，因为他与神一样，拥有非凡的“无情”（apatheia）。例如，当安东尼从与恶魔搏斗了二十年的墓穴中出来时，阿塔纳修斯说，安东尼的身体丝毫没有衰老的迹象。他是一位完美的基督徒，他的宁静和不为所动使他与众不同：“他的灵魂平静无波，因此他的外表也十分安详。” ¹³他完美地效法了基督：正如道成肉身，降临到这腐朽的世界，与邪恶势力争战，安东尼也同样降临到魔鬼的居所。阿塔纳修斯从未提及默观，而根据克莱门特或奥利金等基督教柏拉图主义者的说法，默观曾是成神和得救的途径。人们不再认为凡人能够凭借自身的力量以这种方式升华到神面前。相反，基督徒必须效法道成肉身降临到这腐朽的物质世界。

In his Life of Antony, the famous desert ascetic, Athanasius tried to show how his new doctrine affected Christian spirituality. Antony, known as the father of monasticism, had lived a life of formidable austerity in the Egyptian desert. Yet in The Sayings of the Fathers, an anonymous anthology of maxims of the early desert monks, he comes across as a human and vulnerable man, troubled by boredom, agonizing over human problems and giving simple, direct advice. In his biography, however, Athanasius presents him in an entirely different light. He is, for example, transformed into an ardent opponent of Arianism; he had already begun to enjoy a foretaste of his future apotheosis, since he shares the divine apatheia to a remarkable degree. When, for example, he emerged from the tombs where he had spent twenty years wrestling with demons, Athanasius says that Antony’s body showed no signs of ageing. He was a perfect Christian, whose serenity and impassibility set him apart from other men: “his soul was unperturbed, and so his outward appearance was calm.”¹³ He had perfectly imitated Christ: just as the Logos had taken flesh, descended into the corrupt world and fought the powers of evil, so Antony had descended into the abode of demons. Athanasius never mentions contemplation, which according to such Christian platonists as Clement or Origen had been the means of deification and salvation. It was no longer considered possible for mere mortals to ascend to God in this way by their own natural powers. Instead, Christians must imitate the descent of the Word made flesh into the corruptible, material world.

但基督徒们仍然感到困惑：如果只有一位神，那么道（逻各斯）又怎能是神呢？最终，土耳其东部卡帕多西亚的三位杰出神学家提出了一个令东正教会满意的解释。他们分别是凯撒利亚主教巴西尔（约329-379年）、他的弟弟尼撒主教格列高利（335-395年）以及他的朋友纳齐安的格列高利（329-391年）。这三位被称为卡帕多西亚人的神学家，都是虔诚的信徒。他们热爱思辨和哲学，但坚信只有宗教经验才能解开上帝之谜。他们都接受过希腊哲学的训练，深知真理的事实内容与其更难以捉摸的方面之间存在着至关重要的区别。早期的希腊理性主义者就曾指出这一点：柏拉图将哲学（以理性表达，因此能够被证明）与同样重要的、通过神话传承下来的教义进行了对比。难以用科学方法证明。我们已经看到，亚里士多德也曾做出过类似的区分，他指出人们参与神秘宗教并非为了学习（mathein）任何东西，而是为了体验（pathein）某些东西。巴西尔在基督教意义上表达了同样的见解，他区分了教条（dogma）和宣讲（kerygma）。这两种基督教教义对宗教都至关重要。宣讲是教会基于圣经的公开教义。然而，教条代表了圣经真理的更深层含义，这种含义只能通过宗教体验来理解，并以象征形式表达。除了福音书清晰的信息之外，使徒们还“以神秘的方式”传承了一种秘密或深奥的传统；这是一种“私下且秘密的教导”。

But Christians were still confused: if there was only one God, how could the Logos also be divine? Eventually three outstanding theologians of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey came up with a solution that satisfied the Eastern Orthodox Church. They were Basil, Bishop of Caesarea (ca. 329–79), his younger brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335–95) and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–91). The Cappadocians, as they are called, were all deeply spiritual men. They thoroughly enjoyed speculation and philosophy but were convinced that religious experience alone could provide the key to the problem of God. Trained in Greek philosophy, they were all aware of a crucial distinction between the factual content of truth and its more elusive aspects. The early Greek rationalists had drawn attention to this: Plato had contrasted philosophy (which was expressed in terms of reason and was thus capable of proof) with the equally important teaching handed down by means of mythology, which eluded scientific demonstration. We have seen that Aristotle had made a similar distinction when he had noted that people attended the mystery religions not to learn (mathein) anything but to experience (pathein) something. Basil expressed the same insight in a Christian sense when he distinguished between dogma and kerygma. Both kinds of Christian teaching were essential to religion. Kerygma was the public teaching of the Church, based on the scriptures. Dogma, however, represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth, which could only be apprehended through religious experience and expressed in symbolic form. Besides the clear message of the Gospels, a secret or esoteric tradition had been handed down “in a mystery” from the apostles; this had been a “private and secret teaching,”

在礼仪符号和耶稣清晰的教导背后，隐藏着一个秘密教义，它代表着对信仰更深入的理解。

Behind the liturgical symbols and the lucid teachings of Jesus, there was a secret dogma which represented a more developed understanding of the faith.

在上帝的历史上，区分秘传真理和显传真理至关重要。这并非希腊基督徒的专属，犹太教徒和穆斯林也发展出了各自的秘传传统。“秘密”教义的概念并非意在排斥异己。巴西尔并非在谈论早期的共济会，他只是在强调并非所有宗教真理都能清晰、合乎逻辑地表达和定义。某些宗教洞见蕴含着内在的共鸣，只能在柏拉图所谓的“沉思”（theoria）中，由每个人在特定的时代领悟。由于所有宗教都指向超越常规概念和范畴的不可言喻的实在，语言便显得局限且令人困惑。如果人们没有用灵性之眼“看见”这些真理，那些经验尚浅的人很容易产生错误的理解。因此，除了字面意义之外，经文还具有精神层面的意义，而这种意义并非总是能够清晰表达的。佛陀也曾指出，有些问题是“不恰当的”或不合适的，因为它们涉及言语无法企及的现实。你只能通过内省的冥想技巧来发现它们：在某种意义上，你必须自己去创造它们。试图描述用语言来描述它们，很可能就像用语言来描述贝多芬晚期的一首弦乐四重奏一样怪诞。正如巴兹尔所说，这些难以捉摸的宗教现实只能通过礼拜仪式的象征性姿态来暗示，或者，更好的办法，是通过沉默^。15

A distinction between esoteric and exoteric truth will be extremely important in the history of God. It was not to be confined to Greek Christians, but Jews and Muslims would also develop an esoteric tradition. The idea of a “secret” doctrine was not to shut people out. Basil was not talking about an early form of Freemasonry. He was simply calling attention to the fact that not all religious truth was capable of being expressed and defined clearly and logically. Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual in his own time during what Plato had called theoria, contemplation. Since all religion was directed toward an ineffable reality that lay beyond normal concepts and categories, speech was limiting and confusing. If they did not “see” these truths with the eye of the spirit, people who were not yet very experienced could get quite the wrong idea. Besides their literal meaning, therefore, the scriptures also had a spiritual significance which it was not always possible to articulate. The Buddha had also noted that certain questions were “improper” or inappropriate, since they referred to realities that lay beyond the reach of words. You would only discover them by undergoing the introspective techniques of contemplation: in some sense you had to create them for yourself. The attempt to describe them in words was likely to be as grotesque as a verbal account of one of Beethoven’s late quartets. As Basil said, these elusive religious realities could only be suggested in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy or, better still, by silence.¹⁵

西方基督教将变得更加健谈，并专注于宣讲福音（kerygma）：这将成为其与上帝关系的主要问题之一。然而，在希腊东正教中，所有优秀的教义都将保持沉默或持否定神学的态度。正如尼撒的格列高利所说，任何关于上帝的概念都只是拟像，是虚假的形象，是偶像：它无法揭示上帝本身。 ¹⁶基督徒必须像亚伯拉罕一样，在格列高利笔下的亚伯拉罕生平中，他摒弃了所有关于上帝的观念，并接受了“不掺杂任何概念的纯粹信仰”。 ¹⁷格列高利在其《摩西传》中坚持认为，“我们所寻求之物的真正洞见和知识，恰恰在于看不见，在于意识到我们的目标超越一切知识，并被不可理解的黑暗所隔绝。” ¹⁸我们无法在理智上“看见”上帝，但如果我们让自己沉浸在降临西奈山的云雾之中，我们就能感受到他的存在。巴西尔重新拾起了斐洛对上帝的本质（ ousia）和他在世上的作为（ energeiai ）所做的区分：“我们只能通过上帝的作为（ energeiai）来认识他，但我们并不试图接近他的本质。” ¹⁹这将成为东方教会未来所有神学的基调。

Western Christianity would become a much more talkative religion and would concentrate on the kerygma: this would be one of its chief problems with God. In the Greek Orthodox Church, however, all good theology would be silent or apophatic. As Gregory of Nyssa said, every concept of God is a mere simulacrum, a false likeness, an idol: it could not reveal God himself.¹⁶ Christians must be like Abraham, who, in Gregory’s version of his life, laid aside all ideas about God and took hold of a faith which was “unmixed and pure of any concept.”¹⁷ In his Life of Moses, Gregory insisted that “the true vision and the knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.”¹⁸ We cannot “see” God intellectually, but if we let ourselves be enveloped in the cloud that descended upon Mount Sinai, we will feel his presence. Basil reverted to the distinction that Philo had made between God’s essence (ousia) and his activities (energeiai) in the world: “We know our God only by his operations (energeiai) but we do not undertake to approach his essence.”¹⁹ This would be the keynote of all future theology in the Eastern Church.

卡帕多西亚人也急于发展圣灵的概念，他们认为尼西亚会议对圣灵的论述过于草率：“我们信圣灵”这句话似乎只是在亚他那修的信经中随意添加的。人们对圣灵感到困惑。它仅仅是上帝的同义词，还是另有深意？纳齐安的格列高利指出：“有些人认为圣灵是一种活动，有些人认为它是受造物，有些人认为它是上帝，还有些人不确定该如何称呼它。” ²⁰圣保罗曾谈到圣灵具有更新、创造和圣化的能力，但这些活动只能由上帝来完成。因此，圣灵——祂在我们里面的存在被认为是我们的救恩——必定是神圣的，而非仅仅是受造物。卡帕多西亚人采用了阿塔纳修斯在与阿里乌斯的辩论中使用的公式：上帝有一个我们无法理解的单一本质（ ousia ），但有三种表达方式（ hypostases）使他为人所知。

The Cappadocians were also anxious to develop the notion of the Holy Spirit, which they felt had been dealt with very perfunctorily at Nicaea: “And we believe in the Holy Spirit” seemed to have been added to Athanasius’s creed almost as an afterthought. People were confused about the Holy Spirit. Was it simply a synonym for God or was it something more? “Some have conceived [the Spirit] as an activity,” noted Gregory of Nazianzus, “some as a creature, some as God and some have been uncertain what to call him.”²⁰ St. Paul had spoken of the Holy Spirit as renewing, creating and sanctifying, but these activities could only be performed by God. It followed, therefore, that the Holy Spirit, whose presence within us was said to be our salvation, must be divine, not a mere creature. The Cappadocians employed a formula that Athanasius had used in his dispute with Arius: God had a single essence (ousia) which remained incomprehensible to us—but three expressions (hypostases) which made him known.

卡帕多西亚人并没有从上帝不可知的本质（ousia）入手来探讨上帝，而是从人类对上帝位格（hypostases）的体验开始。因为上帝的本质深不可测，我们只能通过体验来认识他。这些显现以圣父、圣子和圣灵的形式向我们揭示。但这并不意味着卡帕多西亚人相信三位一体的神，正如一些西方神学家所想象的那样。对于不熟悉希腊语的人来说， “hypostasis” （本质）一词容易引起困惑，因为它有多种含义：一些拉丁学者，例如圣杰罗姆，认为“ hypostasis ”与“ousia” （本质）意思相同，并认为希腊人相信三种神圣本质。但卡帕多西亚人坚持认为，“ousia”和“hypostasis”之间存在着重要的区别，这一点必须牢记。因此，事物的“ousia”是指事物之所以为它的本质；它通常用于描述事物自身的内在属性。而“ hypostasis”则用来指从外部观察到的事物。有时，卡帕多西亚人喜欢用“prosopon”（人格）一词来代替“hypostasis”。 “ Prosopon ”一词最初意为“力量”，但后来衍生出许多引申义：它可以指人脸上的表情，是其内心状态的外在表现；它也用来指人有意识地扮演的角色或意图塑造的形象。因此，与“hypostasis”（本体）类似，“prosopon”也指某人内在本质的外在表达，或个体呈现在旁观者面前的自我。所以，当卡帕多西亚人说上帝是“一个本体，三个本体”（ousia in three hypostases）时，他们的意思是，上帝本身是“一”：只有一个神圣的自我意识。但当他允许他的造物瞥见他自身的某些方面时，他就变成了“三个prosopoi” （prosopoi） 。

Instead of beginning their consideration of God with his unknowable ousia, the Cappadocians began with mankind’s experience of his hypostases. Because God’s ousia is unfathomable, we can only know him through those manifestations which have been revealed to us as Father, Son and Spirit. This did not mean that the Cappadocians believed in three divine beings, however, as some Western theologians imagined. The word hypostasis was confusing to people who were not familiar with Greek, because it had a variety of senses: some Latin scholars like St. Jerome believed that the word hypostasis meant the same as ousia and thought that the Greeks believed in three divine essences. But the Cappadocians insisted that there was an important difference between ousia and hypostasis, which it was essential to bear in mind. Thus the ousia of an object was that which made something what it was; it was usually applied to an object as it was within itself. Hypostasis, on the other hand, was used to denote an object viewed from without. Sometimes the Cappadocians liked to use the word prosopon instead of hypostasis. Prosopon had originally meant “force” but had acquired a number of secondary meanings: thus it could refer to the expression on a person’s face which was an outward depiction of his state of mind; it was also used to denote a role that he had consciously adopted or a character that he intended to act. Consequently, like hypostasis, prosopon meant the exterior expression of somebody’s inner nature, or the individual self as it was presented to an onlooker. So when the Cappadocians said that God was one ousia in three hypostases, they meant that God as he is in himself was One: there was only a single, divine self-consciousness. But when he allows something of himself to be glimpsed by his creatures, he is three prosopoi.

因此，圣父、圣子和圣灵这三个位格不应等同于上帝本身，因为正如尼撒的格列高利所解释的，“神性（ousia）是不可名状、不可言说的”；“圣父”、“圣子”和“圣灵”仅仅是我们用来指称上帝藉以启示自身的“能量”（energeiai ）的“术语”。 ²¹然而，这些术语具有象征意义，因为它们将不可言说的实在转化为我们能够理解的形象。人们体验过上帝的超越性（隐藏在不可接近的光明中的圣父）、创造性（道）和内在性（圣灵）。但这三个位格仅仅是对神性本身的片面和不完整的瞥见，神性远远超越了这些形象和概念。²²因此，三位一体不应被视为一个字面意义上的事实，而应被视为一个范式，它对应于上帝隐秘生命中的真实事实。

Thus the hypostases Father, Son and Spirit should not be identified with God himself, because, as Gregory of Nyssa explained, “the divine nature (ousia) is unnameable and unspeakable”; “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit” are only “terms that we use” to speak of the energeiai by which he has made himself known.²¹ Yet these terms have symbolic value because they translate the ineffable reality into images that we can understand. Men have experienced God as transcendent (the Father, hidden in inaccessible light), as creative (the Logos) and as immanent (the Holy Spirit). But these three hypostases are only partial and incomplete glimpses of the Divine Nature itself, which lies far beyond such imagery and conceptualization.²² The Trinity, therefore, should not be seen as a literal fact but as a paradigm that corresponds to real facts in the hidden life of God.

在《致阿拉比乌斯的信：论并无三位神》中，尼撒的格列高利阐述了他关于三位一体神性不可分割或相互依存的重要教义。人们不应认为上帝将自身分裂成三个部分；这是一种荒谬且亵渎的想法。上帝在这三个位格中，每一个都完整地、完全地彰显了自身。当祂想要向世人启示自己时，祂便会显现。因此，三位一体向我们揭示了“从神延伸至受造界的一切运作”的模式：正如圣经所表明的，它起源于圣父，经由圣子施行，并藉着内住的圣灵在世上生效。然而，神性在这一运作的每个阶段都同样临在于祂。在我们自身的经验中，我们可以看到这三个位格的相互依存：若非圣子的启示，我们便永远不会认识圣父；若非内住的圣灵使我们认识圣子，我们也无法认出祂。圣灵伴随圣父的神圣圣言，正如气息（希腊语：pneuma；拉丁语：Spiritus）伴随人所说的话。三位一体并非并存于神圣的世界中。我们可以将他们比作一个人头脑中不同的知识领域：哲学或许与医学不同，但它并不占据一个独立的意识领域。不同的学科相互交融，充斥着整个思维，却又各自独立^。23

In his letter To Alabius: That There Are Not Three Gods, Gregory of Nyssa outlined his important doctrine of the inseparability or coinherence of the three divine persons or hypostases. One should not think of God splitting himself up into three parts; that was a grotesque and indeed blasphemous idea. God expressed himself wholly and totally in each one of these three manifestations when he wished to reveal himself to the world. Thus the Trinity gives us an indication of the pattern of “every operation which extends from God to creation”: as Scripture shows, it has its origin in the Father, proceeds through the agency of the Son and is made effective in the world by means of the immanent Spirit. But the Divine Nature is equally present in each phase of the operation. In our own experience we can see the interdependence of the three hypostases: we should never have known about the Father were it not for the revelation of the Son, nor could we recognize the Son without the indwelling Spirit who makes him known to us. The Spirit accompanies the divine Word of the Father, just as the breath (Greek, pneuma; Latin, Spiritus) accompanies the word spoken by a man. The three persons do not exist side by side in the divine world. We can compare them to the presence of different fields of knowledge in the mind of an individual: philosophy may be different from medicine, but it does not inhabit a separate sphere of consciousness. The different sciences pervade one another, fill the whole mind and yet remain distinct.²³

然而，归根结底，三位一体只有作为一种神秘或灵性体验才能被理解：它必须被体验，而非被思考，因为上帝远远超越了人类的概念。它并非逻辑或理性的表述，而是一种超越理性的想象范式。纳齐安的格列高利对此阐述得非常清楚，他解释说，默想三位一体会引发一种深刻而强烈的感受，这种感受会使理性思维和逻辑思维变得混乱。

Ultimately, however, the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience: it had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity.

希腊和俄罗斯东正教基督徒仍然认为，默想三位一体是一种令人振奋的宗教体验。然而，对许多西方基督徒来说，三位一体却令人费解。这可能是因为他们只考虑了卡帕多西亚人所谓的三位一体的宣讲特质，而对希腊人来说，这是一个教义真理，只能通过直觉和宗教体验来领悟。当然，从逻辑上讲，这完全说不通。纳齐安的格列高利在早前的一次讲道中解释说，三位一体教义的不可理解性恰恰使我们直面上帝的绝对奥秘；它提醒我们……我们不能指望理解他。25^这应当阻止我们对一位上帝妄下断言，因为当他启示自己时，他只能以不可言喻的方式表达他的本性。巴西尔也警告我们不要妄想能够弄清三位一体的运作方式：例如，试图弄明白神性的三个位格如何既相同又不同是徒劳的。这超越了语言、概念和人类的分析能力^。26

Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians continue to find that the contemplation of the Trinity is an inspiring religious experience. For many Western Christians, however, the Trinity is simply baffling. This could be because they consider only what the Cappadocians would have called its kerygmatic qualities, whereas for the Greeks it was a dogmatic truth that was only grasped intuitively and as a result of religious experience. Logically, of course, it made no sense at all. In an earlier sermon, Gregory of Nazianzus had explained that the very incomprehensibility of the dogma of the Trinity brings us up against the absolute mystery of God; it reminds us that we must not hope to understand him.²⁵ It should prevent us from making facile statements about a God who, when he reveals himself, can only express his nature in an ineffable manner. Basil also warned us against imagining that we could work out the way in which the Trinity operated, so to speak: it was no good, for example, attempting to puzzle out how the three hypostases of the Godhead were at one and the same time identical and distinct. This lay beyond words, concepts and human powers of analysis.²⁶

因此，三位一体不应按字面意思解释；它并非晦涩难懂的“理论”，而是沉思默想（theoria）的结果。十八世纪，西方基督徒对这一教条感到尴尬，并试图抛弃它，是因为他们试图使上帝变得理性，使其符合理性时代的理解。正如我们将看到的，这正是导致十九世纪和二十世纪所谓“上帝之死”的因素之一。卡帕多西亚人发展出这种富有想象力的范式，其原因之一是为了防止上帝变得像希腊哲学中那样理性，正如阿里乌斯等异端所理解的那样。阿里乌斯的神学过于清晰和逻辑严密。三位一体提醒基督徒，我们称之为“上帝”的现实无法被人类的理性所把握。尼西亚会议上阐述的道成肉身教义固然重要，但也可能导致简单化的偶像崇拜。人们可能会开始以过于人性化的方式看待上帝：甚至可能想象“祂”像我们一样思考、行动和计划。由此，很容易就会将各种偏见强加于上帝，并将其奉为绝对真理。三位一体正是为了纠正这种倾向。与其将其视为对上帝的客观陈述，不如将其视为一首诗，或一场神学上的舞蹈，它介于凡人对“上帝”的信仰和接受，以及一种心照不宣的认知之间——即任何此类陈述或宣讲都只能是暂时的。

Thus the Trinity must not be interpreted in a literal manner; it was not an abstruse “theory” but the result of theoria, contemplation. When Christians in the West became embarrassed by this dogma during the eighteenth century and tried to jettison it, they were trying to make God rational and comprehensible to the Age of Reason. This was one of the factors that would lead to the so-called Death of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we shall see. One of the reasons why the Cappadocians evolved this imaginative paradigm was to prevent God from becoming as rational as he was in Greek philosophy, as understood by such heretics as Arius. The theology of Arius was a little too clear and logical. The Trinity reminded Christians that the reality that we called “God” could not be grasped by the human intellect. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as expressed at Nicaea, was important but could lead to a simplistic idolatry. People might start thinking about God himself in too human a way: it might even be possible to imagine “him” thinking, acting and planning like us. From there, it was only a very short step to attributing all kinds of prejudiced opinions to God and thus making them absolute. The Trinity was an attempt to correct this tendency. Instead of seeing it as a statement of fact about God, it should, perhaps, be seen as a poem or a theological dance between what is believed and accepted by mere mortals about “God” and the tacit realization that any such statement or kerygma could only be provisional.

希腊语和西方对“理论”一词的用法差异颇具启发性。在东方基督教中，“theoria ”始终指沉思。而在西方，“理论”则指必须经过逻辑论证的理性假设。发展一套关于上帝的“理论”意味着“祂”可以被纳入人类的思维体系之中。当时只有三位拉丁神学家参加了尼西亚会议。大多数西方基督徒的水平还达不到这种程度，而且由于他们无法理解一些希腊术语，许多人对三位一体的教义感到不满。或许它无法完全翻译成另一种语言。每一种文化都必须创造自己对上帝的理解。西方人觉得希腊人对三位一体的解释难以理解，他们不得不提出自己的解释。

The difference between the Greek and the Western use of the word “theory” is instructive. In Eastern Christianity, theoria would always mean contemplation. In the West, “theory” has come to mean a rational hypothesis which must be logically demonstrated. Developing a “theory” about God implied that “he” could be contained in a human system of thought. There had only been three Latin theologians at Nicaea. Most Western Christians were not up to this level of discussion and, since they would not understand some of the Greek terminology, many felt unhappy with the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps it was not wholly translatable into another idiom. Every culture has to create its own idea of God. If Westerners found the Greek interpretation of the Trinity alien, they would have to come up with a version of their own.

为拉丁教会阐明三位一体教义的拉丁神学家是奥古斯丁。他也是一位虔诚的柏拉图主义者，并忠于普罗提诺，因此，他比一些西方同僚更倾向于接受这一希腊教义。正如他所解释的，误解往往仅仅是由于术语上的差异：

The Latin theologian who defined the Trinity for the Latin Church was Augustine. He was also an ardent Platonist and devoted to Plotinus and was, therefore, more sympathetically disposed to this Greek doctrine than some of his Western colleagues. As he explained, misunderstanding was often simply due to terminology:

希腊人通过考察三位一体来理解上帝，拒绝分析上帝单一的、未启示的本质；而奥古斯丁及其后的西方基督徒则从神圣的统一性出发，进而探讨其三种显现。希腊基督徒敬仰奥古斯丁，视他为教会的伟大教父之一，但他们对他的三位一体神学抱有怀疑，认为这种神学使上帝显得过于理性且拟人化。奥古斯丁的进路并非像希腊人那样是形而上学的，而是心理学的，并且高度个人化。

Where the Greeks approached God by considering the three hypostases, refusing to analyze his single, unrevealed essence, Augustine himself and Western Christians after him have begun with the divine unity and then proceeded to discuss its three manifestations. Greek Christians venerated Augustine, seeing him as one of the great Fathers of the Church, but they were mistrustful of his Trinitarian theology, which they felt made God seem too rational and anthropomorphic. Augustine’s approach was not metaphysical, like the Greeks’, but psychological and highly personal.

奥古斯丁堪称西方精神的奠基人。除了圣保罗之外，没有哪位神学家在西方的影响力能超过他。我们对他的了解比任何一位晚期古代思想家都更为深入，这很大程度上要归功于他的《忏悔录》，这部雄辩而充满激情的作品记录了他发现上帝的历程。奥古斯丁自幼便寻求一种有神论的宗教。他认为上帝对人类至关重要：“你为自己创造了我们，”他在《忏悔录》的开篇对上帝说道， “我们的心若不归向你，便永无安宁！” ²⁸在迦太基教授修辞学期间，他皈依了摩尼教——一种美索不达米亚式的诺斯替主义——但最终他放弃了摩尼教，因为他觉得它的宇宙论并不令人满意。他认为道成肉身的概念令人反感，是对上帝理念的亵渎。但在意大利期间，米兰主教安布罗斯说服了他，基督教与柏拉图和普罗提诺的思想并非水火不容。然而，奥古斯丁仍然不愿迈出接受洗礼的最后一步。他觉得基督教意味着独身，而他不愿迈出这一步：“主啊，赐予我贞洁，”他常常祈祷，“但现在还不是时候。” ²⁹

Augustine can be called the founder of the Western spirit. No other theologian, apart from St. Paul, has been more influential in the West. We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity, largely because of his Confessions, the eloquent and passionate account of his discovery of God. From his earliest years, Augustine had sought a theistic religion. He saw God as essential to humanity: “Thou hast made us for thyself,” he tells God at the beginning of the Confessions, “and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee!”²⁸ While teaching rhetoric in Carthage, he was converted to Manicheism, a Mesopotamian form of Gnosticism, but eventually he abandoned it because he found its cosmology unsatisfactory. He found the notion of the Incarnation offensive, a defilement of the idea of God, but while he was in Italy, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was able to convince him that Christianity was not incompatible with Plato and Plotinus. Yet Augustine was reluctant to take the final step and accept baptism. He felt that for him Christianity entailed celibacy and he was loath to take that step: “Lord, give me chastity,” he used to pray, “but not yet.”²⁹

他最终的转变是一场狂飙突进式的、激烈的变革。从他的前世经历到痛苦的重生，这正是西方宗教经验的典型特征。有一天，当他和朋友阿利皮乌斯在米兰的花园里坐着时，这场斗争达到了高潮：

His final conversion was an affair of Sturm und Drang, a violent wrench from his past life and a painful rebirth, which has been characteristic of Western religious experience. One day, while he was sitting with his friend Alypius in their garden at Milan, the struggle came to a head:

在西方，上帝并非总是轻易地临到我们。奥古斯丁的皈依似乎是一种心理上的宣泄，皈依者精疲力竭地投入上帝的怀抱，所有的激情都已消散。奥古斯丁躺在地上痛哭流涕时，突然听到附近房子里传来一个孩子的声音，吟唱着“Tolle, lege：拿起来读，拿起来读！”奥古斯丁将此视为神谕，猛地站起身，冲回震惊不已、饱受煎熬的阿利皮乌斯身边，抓起他的《新约圣经》。他翻开圣经，读到圣保罗写给罗马人的那段话：“不可荒宴醉酒，不可好色邪荡，不可争竞纷争，总要披戴主耶稣基督，不要为肉体和肉体的私欲安排。”漫长的挣扎终于结束了。“我既不想也不需要再读下去了，”奥古斯丁回忆道。 “就在这句话的最后一个字说完的那一刻，仿佛一股解脱之光瞬间照亮了我的心，驱散了所有的焦虑。所有的疑虑都烟消云散了。” ³¹

God has not always come easily to us in the West. Augustine’s conversion seems like a psychological abreaction, after which the convert falls exhausted into the arms of God, all passion spent. As Augustine lay weeping on the ground, he suddenly heard a child’s voice in a nearby house chanting the phrase “Tolle, lege: pick up and read, pick up and read!” Taking this as an oracle, Augustine leapt to his feet, rushed back to the astonished and long-suffering Alypius and snatched up his New Testament. He opened it at St. Paul’s words to the Romans: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts.” The long struggle was over: “I neither wished nor needed to read further,” Augustine recalled. “At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.”³¹

然而，上帝也可以是喜乐的源泉：奥古斯丁皈依基督教后不久，一天晚上，他和母亲莫妮卡在台伯河畔的奥斯蒂亚经历了一次神魂超拔的体验。我们将在第七章对此进行更详细的讨论。作为一名柏拉图主义者，奥古斯丁深知上帝存在于心灵之中，在《忏悔录》第十卷中，他探讨了他称之为“记忆”（ Memoria）的能力。这远比回忆的能力复杂得多，更接近心理学家所说的无意识。对奥古斯丁而言，记忆代表了整个心灵，包括意识和无意识。它的复杂性和多样性令他惊叹不已。这是一个“令人敬畏的奥秘”，一个深不可测的领域。这是一个充满意象的世界，承载着我们过往的记忆，以及无数的平原、洞穴和山洞。32^正是通过这片熙熙攘攘的内心世界，奥古斯丁找到了他的上帝，这位上帝既存在于他之内，又凌驾于他之上，这本身就是一个悖论。仅仅在外部世界寻找上帝存在的证据是徒劳的。他只能在心灵的真实世界中被发现：

God could also be a source of joy, however: not long after his conversion, Augustine experienced an ecstasy one night with his mother, Monica, at Ostia on the River Tiber. We shall discuss this in more detail in Chapter 7. As a Platonist, Augustine knew that God was to be found in the mind, and in Book X of the Confessions, he discussed the faculty of what he called Memoria, memory. This was something far more complex than the faculty of recollection and is closer to what psychologists would call the unconscious. For Augustine, memory represented the whole mind, conscious and unconscious alike. Its complexity and diversity filled him with astonishment. It was an “awe-inspiring mystery,” an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves.³² It was through this teeming inner world that Augustine descended to find his God, who was paradoxically both within and above him. It was no good simply searching for proof of God in the external world. He could only be discovered in the real world of the mind:

因此，上帝并非客观存在，而是存在于复杂深邃的自我之中的精神存在。奥古斯丁不仅与柏拉图和普罗提诺分享了这一洞见，也与佛教徒、印度教徒以及无神论宗教中的萨满教徒分享了这一洞见。然而，他所信奉的并非非人格化的神，而是犹太教-基督教传统中高度人格化的上帝。上帝屈尊俯就人类的软弱，亲自寻找人类：

God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self. Augustine shared this insight not only with Plato and Plotinus but also with Buddhists, Hindus and Shamans in the nontheistic religions. Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the highly personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God had condescended to man’s weakness and gone in search of him:

希腊神学家通常不会将自己的个人经历带入神学著作中，但奥古斯丁的神学却源于他非常个人化的经历。

The Greek theologians did not generally bring their own personal experience into their theological writing, but Augustine’s theology sprang from his own highly individual story.

奥古斯丁对心灵的着迷促使他在五世纪初撰写的《论三位一体》一书中发展出他自己的心理三位一体论。既然上帝按照自己的形象创造了我们，我们就应该能够在心灵深处辨识出三位一体的存在。奥古斯丁并没有像希腊人那样从形而上学的抽象概念和语言上的区分入手，而是从我们大多数人都经历过的真理时刻开始了他的探索。当我们听到“上帝是光”或“上帝是真理”之类的短语时，我们会本能地感受到一种灵性兴趣的激发，并觉得“上帝”能够赋予我们生命意义和价值。然而，在这短暂的启迪之后，我们又会回到平常的状态。当我们沉迷于“习以为常的世俗之事”时，就会陷入这种心境。35^无论我们如何努力，都无法重拾那难以言喻的渴望。正常的思维方式无济于事；相反，我们必须聆听“内心深处”的真正含义，例如“祂是真理”。36^但是，我们有可能爱上一个我们并不了解的现实吗？奥古斯丁进一步指出，既然我们自身的心灵中存在着一个反映上帝的三位一体，就像任何柏拉图式的意象一样，我们便渴望我们的原型——我们被塑造的最初模式。

Augustine’s fascination with the mind led him to develop his own psychological Trinitarianism in the treatise De Trinitate, written in the early years of the fifth century. Since God had made us in his own image, we should be able to discern a trinity in the depths of our minds. Instead of starting with the metaphysical abstractions and verbal distinctions that the Greeks enjoyed, Augustine began this exploration with a moment of truth that most of us have experienced. When we hear such phrases as “God is Light” or “God is truth,” we instinctively feel a quickening of spiritual interest and feel that “God” can give meaning and value to our lives. But after this momentary illumination, we fall back into our normal frame of mind, when we are obsessed with “things accustomed and earthly.”³⁵ Try as we might, we cannot recapture that moment of inarticulate longing. Normal thought processes cannot help us; instead we must listen to “what the heart means” by such phrases as “He is Truth.”³⁶ But is it possible to love a reality that we do not know? Augustine goes on to show that since there is a trinity in our own minds which mirrors God, like any Platonic image, we yearn toward our Archetype—the original pattern on which we were formed.

如果我们从思考心灵如何爱自己入手，我们发现的并非三位一体，而是二元性：爱与心灵。但除非心灵意识到自身，即拥有我们称之为自我意识的能力，否则它无法爱自己。奥古斯丁先于笛卡尔提出，他认为对自身的认识是其他一切确定性的基石。甚至我们对怀疑的体验也使我们意识到自身^。37

If we start by considering the mind loving itself, we find not a trinity but a duality: love and the mind. But unless the mind is aware of itself, with what we should call self-consciousness, it cannot love itself. Anticipating Descartes, Augustine argues that knowledge of ourselves is the bedrock of all other certainty. Even our experience of doubt makes us conscious of ourselves.³⁷

因此，灵魂内部包含三种属性：记忆、理解和意志，分别对应于知识、自知和爱。如同三位一体的神圣位格，这些精神活动本质上是一体的，因为它们并非构成三个独立的心智，而是彼此交融，充满整个心智，并渗透于其他两者之中：“我记得我拥有记忆、理解和意志；我理解我理解、意志和记忆。我意志我自身的意志、记忆和理解。” ³⁸ 因此，如同卡帕多西亚人所描述的神圣三位一体，这三种属性“构成一个生命、一个心智、一个本质。” ³⁹

Within the soul there are three properties, therefore: memory, understanding and will, corresponding to knowledge, self-knowledge and love. Like the three divine persons, these mental activities are essentially one because they do not constitute three separate minds, but each fills the whole mind and pervades the other two: “I remember that I possess memory and understanding and will; I understand that I understand, will and remember. I will my own willing and remembering and understanding.”³⁸ Like the Divine Trinity described by the Cappadocians, all three properties, therefore, “constitute one life, one mind, one essence.”³⁹

然而，对我们心灵运作方式的这种理解仅仅是第一步：我们内在所遇到的三位一体并非上帝本身，而是创造我们的上帝的痕迹。亚他那修和尼撒的格列高利都曾用镜中倒影的意象来描述上帝在人灵魂中转化性的临在。要正确理解这一点，我们必须记住，希腊人相信镜中的影像是真实的，它是观察者眼中的光线与物体发出的光线混合并反射在镜面上形成的。^奥古斯丁认为，心灵中的三位一体也是一种反射，其中包含着上帝的临在，并且指向上帝。^但是，我们如何才能超越这如同镜中模糊倒影般的影像，直达上帝本身呢？上帝与人之间巨大的距离，单凭人的努力是无法跨越的。唯有上帝以道成肉身的方式来到我们中间，我们才能恢复我们内在被罪恶破坏和玷污的上帝的形象。我们敞开自己，迎接神圣的行动，它将通过三重修行来改变我们，奥古斯丁称之为信仰的三位一体：retineo（持守真理）在我们的心中，通过默想（contemplatio）和欣赏（dilectio），逐渐培养对上帝临在的持续感知，三位一体便会显现。42^这种认知并非仅仅是对信息的理性获取，而是一种创造性的修行，它将通过揭示自我深处的神圣维度，从内在转化我们。

This understanding of our mind’s workings, however, is only the first step: the trinity we encounter within us is not God himself but is a trace of the God who made us. Both Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa had used the imagery of a reflection in a mirror to describe God’s transforming presence within the soul of man, and to understand this correctly we must recall that the Greeks believed that the mirror image was real, formed when the light from the eye of the beholder mingled with the light beaming from the object and reflected on the surface of the glass.⁴⁰ Augustine believed that the trinity in the mind was also a reflection that included the presence of God and was directed toward him.⁴¹ But how do we get beyond this image, reflected as in a glass darkly, to God himself? The immense distance between God and man cannot be traversed by human effort alone. It is only because God has come to meet us in the person of the incarnate Word that we can restore the image of God within us, which has been damaged and defaced by sin. We open ourselves to the divine activity which will transform us by a threefold discipline, which Augustine calls the trinity of faith: retineo (holding the truths of the Incarnation in our minds), contemplatio (contemplating them) and dilectio (delighting in them). Gradually, by cultivating a continual sense of God’s presence within our minds in this way, the Trinity will be disclosed.⁴² This knowledge was not just the cerebral acquisition of information but a creative discipline that would transform us from within by revealing a divine dimension in the depths of the self.

西方世界正经历着一段黑暗而可怕的时期。蛮族部落涌入欧洲，罗马帝国走向衰亡：西方文明的崩溃不可避免地影响了当地的基督教信仰。奥古斯丁的伟大导师安布罗斯所宣扬的信仰本质上是一种防御性的：完整性（integritas）是其最重要的美德。教会必须保持其教义的完整性，如同圣母玛利亚纯洁的身体，必须免受蛮族（其中许多人已皈依阿里乌教派）的谬论侵蚀。深深的悲伤也贯穿了奥古斯丁后期的著作：罗马的陷落影响了他关于原罪的教义，而这一教义后来成为西方人世界观的核心。奥古斯丁认为，上帝仅仅因为亚当犯下的一个罪，就将人类判处永世的诅咒。这种继承的罪孽通过性行为传递给了他的所有后代，而性行为被奥古斯丁称为“私欲”（concupiscence）所玷污。情欲是一种非理性的欲望，它驱使我们从凡物而非上帝身上获得快乐；在性行为中，这种欲望最为强烈，此时我们的理性完全被激情和情感所淹没，上帝被彻底遗忘，而人与人之间则肆无忌惮地沉溺于彼此的欢愉。这种理性被感官的混乱和无法无天的激情所拖垮的景象，与西方理性、法律和秩序的源泉——罗马——被蛮族部落摧毁的景象惊人地相似。由此可见，奥古斯丁严苛的教义描绘了一幅冷酷无情的上帝的可怕形象：

These were dark and terrible times in the Western world. The barbarian tribes were pouring into Europe and bringing down the Roman empire: the collapse of civilization in the West inevitably affected Christian spirituality there. Ambrose, Augustine’s great mentor, preached a faith that was essentially defensive: integritas (wholeness) was its most important virtue. The Church had to preserve its doctrines intact, and, like the pure body of the Virgin Mary, it must remain unpenetrated by the false doctrines of the barbarians (many of whom had converted to Arianism). A deep sadness also informed Augustine’s later work: the fall of Rome influenced his doctrine of Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people would view the world. Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because of Adam’s one sin. The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the sexual act, which was polluted by what Augustine called “concupiscence.” Concupiscence was the irrational desire to take pleasure in mere creatures instead of God; it was felt most acutely during the sexual act, when our rationality is entirely swamped by passion and emotion, when God is utterly forgotten and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. This image of reason dragged down by the chaos of sensations and lawless passions was disturbingly similar to Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low by the barbarian tribes. By implication, Augustine’s harsh doctrine paints a terrible picture of an implacable God:

犹太教徒和希腊东正教徒都没有以如此灾难性的视角看待亚当的堕落；后来的穆斯林也没有接受这种关于原罪的阴暗神学。这种教义是西方独有的，它加剧了特土良早先对上帝所描绘的严酷形象。

Neither Jews nor Greek Orthodox Christians regarded the fall of Adam in such a catastrophic light; nor, later, would Muslims adopt this dark theology of Original Sin. Unique to the West, the doctrine compounds the harsh portrait of God suggested earlier by Tertullian.

奥古斯丁给我们留下了一份沉重的遗产。一种教导男女将自身人性视为天生缺陷的宗教，会使他们与自身疏离。这种疏离在对性（尤其是对女性）的贬低中体现得最为明显。尽管基督教最初对女性持相当积极的态度，但在奥古斯丁时代，西方基督教已经滋生出厌女倾向。杰罗姆的书信中充斥着对女性的厌恶，有时甚至近乎疯狂。特土良曾严厉斥责女性是邪恶的诱惑者，是人类永恒的威胁。

Augustine left us with a difficult heritage. A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. Even though Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of Augustine. The letters of Jerome teem with loathing of the female which occasionally sounds deranged. Tertullian had castigated women as evil temptresses, an eternal danger to mankind:

奥古斯丁对此表示赞同；他写信给一位朋友说：“有什么区别呢？无论是妻子还是母亲，我们必须提防的仍然是夏娃——那个诱惑者。” ⁴⁵事实上，奥古斯丁显然对上帝创造女性感到困惑：毕竟，“如果亚当需要的是良伴和交谈，那么安排两个男人做朋友岂不更好，而不是一男一女。” ⁴⁶女性的唯一功能就是生育，将原罪的传染传递给下一代，就像性病一样。一种对半数人类抱有偏见，并将所有非自主的思想、心灵和身体活动都视为致命情欲症状的宗教，只会使男女疏离自身处境。西方基督教从未完全摆脱这种神经质的厌女症，这种厌女症至今仍体现在对圣职授任这一概念的失衡反应中。当时，东方女性和所有奥伊库梅内女性一样，都背负着低人一等的重担；而西方的姐妹们则背负着令人厌恶和罪恶的性欲污名，这导致她们在仇恨和恐惧中被排斥。

Augustine agreed; “What is the difference,” he wrote to a friend, “whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman.”⁴⁵ In fact Augustine is clearly puzzled that God should have made the female sex: after all, “if it was good company and conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better arranged to have two men together as friends, not a man and a woman.”⁴⁶ Woman’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease. A religion which looks askance upon half the human race and which regards every involuntary motion of mind, heart and body as a symptom of fatal concupiscence can only alienate men and women from their condition. Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny, which can still be seen in the unbalanced reaction to the very notion of the ordination of women. While Eastern women shared the burden of inferiority carried by all women of the Oikumene at this time, their sisters in the West carried the additional stigma of a loathsome and sinful sexuality which caused them to be ostracized in hatred and fear.

这真是莫大的讽刺，因为上帝道成肉身、共享人性的观念本应鼓励基督徒珍视肉身。关于这一难以接受的信仰，人们曾展开过激烈的辩论。在四、五世纪，像阿波利纳留、聂斯托留和欧迪克斯这样的“异端”提出了许多棘手的问题：基督的神性如何能与他的人性相容？玛利亚难道不是上帝之母，而是耶稣之母吗？上帝怎么可能是一个无助的、挣扎着的婴儿？更准确的说法难道不是，上帝与基督如同在圣殿中一般，以极其亲密的方式同在吗？尽管存在显而易见的矛盾，正统派仍然坚持己见。亚历山大主教西里尔重申了亚他那修的信仰：上帝确实降临到我们这个充满缺陷和堕落的世界，甚至体验了死亡和被遗弃的滋味。这种信念似乎与上帝完全无情、既不会受苦也不会改变的坚定信念格格不入。希腊人眼中遥远的上帝，其主要特征是神圣的冷漠（apatheia），与据说道成肉身化身为耶稣基督的上帝截然不同。正统派认为，那些对受苦无助的上帝这一概念深恶痛绝的“异端”，企图剥夺神性的神秘和奇妙。道成肉身的悖论似乎正是对希腊上帝的一种解药，因为希腊上帝并没有动摇我们的自满，反而显得如此合情合理。

This is doubly ironic, since the idea that God had become flesh and shared our humanity should have encouraged Christians to value the body. There had been further debates about this difficult belief. During the fourth and fifth centuries, “heretics” such as Apollinarius, Nestorius and Eutyches asked very difficult questions. How had the divinity of Christ been able to cohere with his humanity? Surely Mary was not the mother of God but the mother of the man Jesus? How could God have been a helpless, puling baby? Was it not more accurate to say that he had dwelt with Christ in particular intimacy, as in a temple? Despite the obvious inconsistencies, the orthodox stuck to their guns. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, reiterated the faith of Athanasius: God had indeed descended so deeply into our flawed and corrupt world that he had even tasted death and abandonment. It seemed impossible to reconcile this belief with the equally firm conviction that God was utterly impassible, unable to suffer or change. The remote God of the Greeks, characterized chiefly by the divine apatheia, seemed an entirely different deity from the God who was supposed to have become incarnate in Jesus Christ. The orthodox felt that the “heretics,” who found the idea of a suffering, helpless God deeply offensive, wanted to drain the divine of its mystery and wonder. The paradox of the Incarnation seemed an antidote to the Hellenic God who did nothing to shake our complacency and who was so entirely reasonable.

公元前529年，查士丁尼皇帝关闭了雅典的古老哲学学院，这是知识分子异教的最后堡垒：其最后一位伟大的导师是普罗克洛斯（公元前412-485年），他是普罗提诺的忠实信徒。异教哲学转入地下，似乎已被新兴的基督教所击败。然而，四年后，四部神秘主义论著问世，据称是圣保罗在雅典的第一位皈依者——阿雷奥帕吉特的德尼所著。但实际上，它们出自一位六世纪的希腊基督徒之手，这位基督徒一直保持着匿名。然而，这个笔名具有象征意义，其重要性远超作者的真实身份：伪德尼成功地将新柏拉图主义的思想融入基督教，并将希腊人的神与圣经中的闪米特人神结合在了一起。

In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy in Athens, the last bastion of intellectual paganism: its last great master had been Proclus (412–485), an ardent disciple of Plotinus. Pagan philosophy went underground and seemed defeated by the new religion of Christianity. Four years later, however, four mystical treatises appeared which were purportedly written by Denys the Areopagite, St. Paul’s first Athenian convert. They were, in fact, written by a sixth-century Greek Christian, who has preserved his anonymity. The pseudonym had a symbolic power, however, which was more important than the identity of the author: Pseudo-Denys managed to baptize the insights of Neoplatonism and wed the God of the Greeks to the Semitic God of the Bible.

德尼也是卡帕多西亚教父的继承人。与巴西尔一样，他非常重视宣讲（kerygma）和教条（dogma）之间的区别。在他的一封信中，他肯定了存在两种神学传统，这两种传统都……这源于使徒。宣讲式的福音清晰明了，易于理解；教义式的福音则沉默神秘。然而，两者相互依存，对基督教信仰至关重要。前者是“象征性的，以入门为前提”，后者是“哲学性的，可以论证——不可言说的与可言说的交织在一起”。 ⁴⁷宣讲式的福音以其清晰、显而易见的真理来劝导和激励人心，而教义的沉默或隐秘的传统则是一个需要入门的奥秘：“它通过不教导任何内容的入门仪式，使灵魂与上帝建立联系，” ⁴⁸德尼丝坚持道，其言辞令人想起亚里士多德。存在一种宗教真理，无法用言语、逻辑或理性论述充分传达。它以象征性的方式表达出来，通过礼拜仪式的语言和手势，或通过教义——这些教义如同“神圣的面纱”，遮蔽了不可言喻的意义，但也使全然神秘的上帝适应了人性的局限性，并以人们能够想象（即便无法完全理解）的方式来表达现实^。49

Denys was also the heir of the Cappadocian Fathers. Like Basil, he took the distinction between kerygma and dogma very seriously. In one of his letters, he affirmed that there were two theological traditions, both of which derived from the apostles. The kerygmatic gospel was clear and knowable; the dogmatic gospel was silent and mystical. Both were mutually interdependent, however, and essential to the Christian faith. One was “symbolic and presupposing initiation,” the other “philosophical and capable of proof—and the ineffable is woven with what can be uttered.”⁴⁷ The kerygma persuades and exhorts by its clear, manifest truth, but the silent or hidden tradition of dogma was a mystery that required initiation: “It effects and establishes the soul with God by initiations that do not teach anything,”⁴⁸ Denys insisted, in words that recalled Aristotle. There was a religious truth which could not adequately be conveyed by words, logic or rational discourse. It was expressed symbolically, through the language and gestures of the liturgy or by doctrines which were “sacred veils” that hid the ineffable meaning from view but which also adapted the utterly mysterious God to the limitations of human nature and expressed the Reality in terms that could be grasped imaginatively if not conceptually.⁴⁹

这些隐藏的或深奥的含义并非为特权精英所设，而是为所有基督徒所设。德尼并非提倡一种仅适用于僧侣和苦行者的晦涩难懂的修行方式。所有信徒都参与的礼仪是通往上帝的主要途径，也是他神学的核心。这些真理被隐藏在保护性的面纱之后，并非为了排斥心怀善意的人们，而是为了提升所有基督徒，使他们超越感官知觉和概念，直达上帝那不可言说的实在。卡帕多西亚修道士们曾以谦卑之心宣称所有神学都应是否定神学，而这种谦卑之心在德尼看来，则成为一种大胆攀登至不可言说的上帝的途径。

The hidden or esoteric meaning was not for a privileged elite but for all Christians. Denys was not advocating an abstruse discipline that was suitable for monks and ascetics only. The liturgy, attended by all the faithful, was the chief path to God and dominated his theology. The reason that these truths were hidden behind a protective veil was not to exclude men and women of goodwill but to lift all Christians above sense perceptions and concepts to the inexpressible reality of God himself. The humility which had inspired the Cappadocians to claim that all theology should be apophatic became for Denys a bold method of ascending to the inexpressible God.

事实上，德尼丝根本不喜欢使用“上帝”这个词——或许是因为这个词已经带上了太多不恰当且拟人化的含义。他更倾向于使用普罗克洛斯的术语“神术”（theurgy），这个词主要用于礼仪：在异教世界， “神术”指的是通过献祭和占卜来获取神圣的玛那（mana）。德尼丝将这个概念应用于“谈论上帝”，他认为，如果理解正确，这种谈论也能释放出蕴藏在启示符号中的神圣能量（energeiai）。他同意卡帕多西亚人的观点，即我们所有用来描述上帝的词语和概念都是不充分的，不能被视为对我们认知之外的现实的准确描述。甚至“上帝”这个词本身也是有缺陷的，因为上帝是“超越上帝的”，是“超越存在的奥秘”。^基督徒必须认识到，上帝并非至高无上的存在，并非凌驾于众生之上、统领着一系列低等存在的至高存在。事物和人并不与上帝相对立，并非作为一种独立的现实或另一种可以作为认知对象的存在。

In fact, Denys did not like to use the word “God” at all—probably because it had acquired such inadequate and anthropomorphic connotations. He preferred to use Proclus’s term theurgy, which was primarily liturgical: theurgy in the pagan world had been a tapping of the divine mana by means of sacrifice and divination. Denys applied this to God-talk, which, properly understood, could also release the divine energeiai inherent in the revealed symbols. He agreed with the Cappadocians that all our words and concepts for God were inadequate and must not be taken as an accurate description of a reality which lies beyond our ken. Even the word “God” itself was faulty, since God was “above God,” a “mystery beyond being.”⁵⁰ Christians must realize that God is not the Supreme Being, the highest being of all heading a hierarchy of lesser beings. Things and people do not stand over against God as a separate reality or an alternative being, which can be the object of knowledge.

上帝并非我们所知的任何事物之一，也与我们经验中的任何事物都截然不同。事实上，称上帝为“虚无”更为准确：我们甚至不应称他为三位一体，因为他“既非我们通常意义上的合一，也非三位一体”。 ⁵¹他超越一切名称，正如他超越一切存在。⁵²然而，我们可以利用自己无法言说上帝的这种能力，来达到与他合一的境界，这无异于我们自身本性的“神化”（theosis）。上帝曾在圣经中向我们启示了他的一些名称，例如“父”、“子”和“圣灵”，但这并非为了传授关于他自身的信息，而是为了吸引世人归向他，使他们能够分享他的神性。

God is not one of the things that exist and is quite unlike anything else in our experience. In fact, it is more accurate to call God “Nothing”: we should not even call him a Trinity since he is “neither a unity nor a trinity in the sense in which we know them.”⁵¹ He is above all names just as he is above all being.⁵² Yet we can use our incapacity to speak about God as a method of achieving a union with him, which is nothing less than a “deification” (theosis) of our own nature. God had revealed some of his Names to us in scripture, such as “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit,” yet the purpose of this had not been to impart information about him but to draw men and women toward himself and enable them to share his divine nature.

在德尼的著作《神圣之名》的每一章中，他都以上帝启示的宣讲真理开篇：祂的良善、智慧、父性等等。然后，他进一步指出，尽管上帝通过这些称号揭示了祂自身的某些方面，但祂所揭示的并非祂自身。如果我们真的想要理解上帝，就必须否定这些属性和称号。因此，我们必须说祂既是“上帝”，又是“非上帝”；既是“良善”，又是“非良善”。这种悖论带来的冲击，以及其中既包含认知又包含无知的过程，将使我们超越世俗观念的束缚，抵达那不可言说的实在本身。因此，我们首先要说：

In each chapter of his treatise The Divine Names, Denys begins with a kerygmatic truth, revealed by God: his goodness, wisdom, paternity and so forth. He then proceeds to show that although God has revealed something of himself in these titles, what he reveals is not himself. If we really want to understand God, we must go on to deny those attributes and names. Thus we must say that he is both “God” and “not-God,” “good” and then go on to say that he is “not-good.” The shock of this paradox, a process that includes both knowing and unknowing, will lift us above the world of mundane ideas to the inexpressible reality itself. Thus, we begin by saying that:

因此，研读圣经并非发现关于上帝的事实，而应是一种悖论式的操练，将宣讲（kerygma）转化为教条（dogma）。这种方法是一种神术，一种汲取神圣力量的方式，使我们能够升华到上帝本身，并如柏拉图主义者一直教导的那样，使我们自身成为神。这是一种停止思考的方法！“我们必须抛弃所有关于神圣的概念。我们必须停止我们思维的活动。” ^⁵⁴我们甚至必须抛弃对上帝属性的否定。唯有如此，我们才能与上帝达到狂喜的合一。

Reading the Scriptures is not a process of discovering facts about God, therefore, but should be a paradoxical discipline that turns the kerygma into dogma. This method is a theurgy, a tapping of the divine power that enables us to ascend to God himself and, as Platonists had always taught, become ourselves divine. It is a method to stop us thinking! “We have to leave behind us all our conceptions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds.”⁵⁴ We even have to leave our denials of God’s attributes behind. Then and only then shall we achieve an ecstatic union with God.

当丹尼斯谈到狂喜时，他指的并非某种奇特的精神状态，也不是通过晦涩的瑜伽修行所达到的另一种意识状态。这是每个基督徒都能通过这种看似矛盾的祈祷和灵修方法所体验到的。它能使我们停止说话，并且引领我们进入寂静之地：“当我们沉入那超越理智的黑暗之中，我们不仅会发现自己词穷，而且会真正地哑口无言，茫然无知。” ^⁵⁵与尼撒的格列高利一样，他认为摩西登西奈山的故事颇具启发意义。摩西登上山顶时，并没有亲眼见到上帝，而只是被带到了上帝所在之处。他被浓厚的黑暗笼罩，什么也看不见：因此，我们所能看到或理解的一切，都只是象征（德尼所用的词是“范式”），它揭示了一种超越一切思想的实在的存在。摩西进入了无知的黑暗，从而与超越一切理解的存在合而为一：我们也将达到类似的狂喜，它将“带我们超越自我”，使我们与上帝合而为一。

When Denys talks about ecstasy, he is not referring to a peculiar state of mind or an alternative form of consciousness achieved by an obscure yogic discipline. This is something that every Christian can manage in this paradoxical method of prayer and theoria. It will stop us talking and bring us to the place of silence: “As we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”⁵⁵ Like Gregory of Nyssa, he found the story of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai instructive. When Moses had climbed the mountain, he did not see God himself on the summit but had only been brought to the place where God was. He had been enveloped by a thick cloud of obscurity and could see nothing: thus everything that we can see or understand is only a symbol (the word Denys uses is “paradigm”) which reveals the presence of a reality beyond all thought. Moses had passed into the darkness of ignorance and thus achieved union with that which surpasses all understanding: we will achieve a similar ecstasy that will “take us out of ourselves” and unite us to God.

这之所以成为可能，是因为上帝仿佛降临山巅与我们相遇。在此，德尼与新柏拉图主义决裂，后者认为上帝是静止的、遥远的，对人类的努力完全无动于衷。希腊哲学家笔下的上帝对偶尔能与他达到狂喜合一的神秘主义者浑然不觉，而圣经中的上帝则转向人类。上帝也达到了一种“狂喜”，这种狂喜将他带离自身，进入到脆弱的受造物领域：

This is only possible because, as it were, God comes to meet us on the mountain. Here Denys departs from Neoplatonism, which perceived God as static and remote, entirely unresponsive to human endeavor. The God of the Greek philosophers was unaware of the mystic who occasionally managed to achieve an ecstatic union with him, whereas the God of the Bible turns toward humanity. God also achieves an “ecstasy” which takes him beyond himself to the fragile realm of created being:

散发不再是自动的过程，而变成了一种充满激情、自愿流露的爱。德尼的否定和悖论方式，不仅是我们主动去做的事情，更是发生在我们身上的事情。

Emanation had become a passionate and voluntary outpouring of love, rather than an automatic process. Denys’s way of negation and paradox was not just something that we do but something that happens to us.

对普罗提诺而言，神魂超拔是一种极其罕见的狂喜：他一生中只体验过两三次。而德尼则认为神魂超拔是每个基督徒的常态。这是圣经和礼仪中隐藏的或深奥的信息，体现在最细微的举动之中。因此，当主祭在弥撒开始时离开祭台，穿过信众，用圣水洒遍他们，然后再返回圣所时，这不仅仅是一个净化仪式——尽管它也包含净化的成分。它模仿了神圣的神魂超拔，在这种状态下，上帝离开他的独处，与众人同在。他将自己与他所创造的万物融为一体。或许理解丹尼斯神学的最佳方式，是将其视为一种精神上的舞蹈，介于我们对上帝的肯定与我们对上帝的一切描述都只能是象征性的认知之间。如同犹太教一样，丹尼斯的上帝具有两个面向：一个面向我们，显现于世；另一个则是上帝内在的另一面，完全不可理解。他“安住于自身”，沉浸于永恒的奥秘之中，同时又完全融入创造之中。他并非独立于世界之外的又一个存在。丹尼斯的方法在希腊神学中成为规范。然而，在西方，神学家们却继续谈论和解释。有些人认为，当他们说“上帝”时，神圣的现实实际上与他们脑海中的概念相吻合。有些人甚至将自己的思想和观念归于上帝——声称上帝想要这个，禁止那个，并计划了另一个——这种做法危险地走向了偶像崇拜。然而，希腊正统基督教的上帝始终保持神秘，三位一体也继续提醒东方基督徒其教义的暂时性。最终，希腊人认定，真正的神学必须符合德尼的两个标准：它必须是沉默的，并且是悖论性的。

For Plotinus, ecstasy had been a very occasional rapture: it had been achieved by him only two or three times in his life. Denys saw ecstasy as the constant state of every Christian. This was the hidden or esoteric message of Scripture and liturgy, revealed in the smallest gestures. Thus when the celebrant leaves the altar at the beginning of the Mass to walk through the congregation, sprinkling it with holy water before returning to the sanctuary, this is not just a rite of purification—though it is that too. It imitates the divine ecstasy, whereby God leaves his solitude and merges himself with his creatures. Perhaps the best way of viewing Denys’s theology is as that spiritual dance between what we can affirm about God and the appreciation that everything we can say about him can only be symbolic. As in Judaism, Denys’s God has two aspects: one is turned toward us and manifests himself in the world; the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely incomprehensible. He “stays within himself” in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally immersed in creation. He is not another being, additional to the world. Denys’s method became normative in Greek theology. In the West, however, theologians would continue to talk and explain. Some imagined that when they said “God,” the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their own thoughts and ideas to God—saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other—in a way that was dangerously idolatrous. The God of Greek Othodoxy, however, would remain mysterious, and the Trinity would continue to remind Eastern Christians of the provisional nature of their doctrines. Eventually, the Greeks decided that an authentic theology must meet Denys’s two criteria: it must be silent and paradoxical.

希腊人和拉丁人对基督的神性也发展出了截然不同的观点。希腊的道成肉身概念由马克西姆斯·忏悔者（约580-662年）阐述，他被誉为拜占庭神学之父。这种观点比西方观点更接近佛教的理想。马克西姆斯认为，只有与神合一，人类才能实现自我圆满，正如佛教徒认为觉悟是人类的最终归宿。“神”因此并非可有可无的附加物，也不是强加于人类境况之上的异己外在现实。男女都拥有神性的潜能，只有当这种潜能得以实现，他们才能成为完整的人。道成肉身并非为了弥补亚当的罪孽；事实上，即使亚当没有犯罪，道成肉身也会发生。男女是按照道的形象创造的，只有当这种形象臻于完美时，他们才能充分发挥自身的潜能。在塔博尔山上，耶稣荣耀的人性向我们展示了我们所有人都可以追求的神化的人性状态。道成肉身，是为了“使整个人成为神，藉着神的恩典成为人——按本性成为完整的人，魂与身，并藉着恩典成为完整的神，魂与身。” ⁵⁷正如开悟和成佛并非超自然力量的入侵，而是对人类固有能力的提升，同样，神化的基督也向我们展示了我们藉着神的恩典所能达到的状态。基督徒人们可以像佛教徒敬仰开悟的乔达摩一样敬仰神人耶稣：他是真正荣耀和圆满的人性的第一个典范。

Greeks and Latins also developed significantly different views of the divinity of Christ. The Greek concept of the incarnation was defined by Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662), who is known as the father of Byzantine theology. This approximates more closely to the Buddhist ideal than does the Western view. Maximus believed that human beings would only fulfill themselves when they had been united to God, just as Buddhists believed that enlightenment was humanity’s proper destiny. “God” was thus not an optional extra, an alien, external reality tacked on to the human condition. Men and women had a potential for the divine and would become fully human only if this was realized. The Logos had not become man to make reparation for the sin of Adam; indeed, the Incarnation would have occurred even if Adam had not sinned. Men and women had been created in the likeness of the Logos, and they would achieve their full potential only if this likeness was perfected. On Mount Tabor, Jesus’ glorified humanity showed us the deified human condition to which we could all aspire. The Word was made flesh in order that “the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man—whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.”⁵⁷ Just as enlightenment and Buddhahood did not involve invasion by a supernatural reality but were an enhancement of powers that were natural to humanity, so too the deified Christ showed us the state that we could acquire by means of God’s grace. Christians could venerate Jesus the God-Man in rather the same way as Buddhists had come to revere the image of the enlightened Gautama: he had been the first example of a truly glorified and fulfilled humanity.

希腊人对道成肉身的理解使基督教更接近东方传统，而西方对耶稣的理解则走向了更为独特的道路。坎特伯雷主教安瑟伦（1033-1109）在其著作《上帝为何成为人》中阐述了经典的道成肉身神学。他认为，罪孽是如此巨大的冒犯，以至于赎罪至关重要，否则上帝对人类的计划将彻底落空。道成肉身是为了替我们赎罪。上帝的公义要求这笔债必须由一位既是神又是人的人来偿还：罪孽之深重意味着只有上帝之子才能拯救我们，但既然罪孽是由人造成的，那么救赎者也必须是人类的一员。这是一种条理清晰、律法主义的体系，它将上帝描绘成一个像人一样思考、判断和权衡一切的人。这也强化了西方对一位严厉上帝的印象，这位上帝只有通过自己儿子的惨死才能得到满足，他的儿子被当作人祭献了出来。

Where the Greek view of Incarnation brought Christianity closer to the oriental tradition, the Western view of Jesus took a more eccentric course. The classic theology was expressed by Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury (1033–1109), in his treatise Why God Became Man. Sin, he argued, had been an affront of such magnitude that atonement was essential if God’s plans for the human race were not to be completely thwarted. The Word had been made flesh to make reparation on our behalf. God’s justice demanded that the debt be repaid by one who was both God and man: the magnitude of the offense meant that only the Son of God could effect our salvation, but, as a man had been responsible, the redeemer also had to be a member of the human race. It was a tidy, legalistic scheme that depicted God thinking, judging and weighing things up as though he were a human being. It also reinforced the Western image of a harsh God who could only be satisfied by the hideous death of his own Son, who had been offered up as a kind of human sacrifice.

在西方世界，三位一体的教义常常被误解。人们倾向于想象三个神圣的人物，或者干脆忽略这一教义，将“上帝”等同于圣父，把耶稣当作神圣的朋友——这显然与圣父和耶稣的层次并不相同。穆斯林和犹太教徒也觉得这一教义令人费解，甚至亵渎神明。然而，我们将看到，犹太教和伊斯兰教的神秘主义者都发展出了惊人相似的神性概念。例如， “虚己”（kenosis）的概念，即上帝自我空虚的狂喜，在卡巴拉和苏菲主义中都至关重要。在三位一体中，圣父将祂的一切传递给圣子，放弃了一切——甚至放弃了以另一个“道”（Word）表达自身的可能性。一旦“道”被说出，圣父便保持沉默：我们无法谈论祂，因为我们所知的唯一上帝是“道”（Logos），也就是圣子。因此，圣父没有身份，没有通常意义上的“我”，颠覆了我们对人格的认知。存在的源头是虚无，这不仅被德尼所瞥见，也被普罗提诺、斐洛甚至佛陀所瞥见。由于圣父通常被视为基督教追求的终点，基督教的旅程便成为通往虚无、无处、无我的旅程。人格化的上帝或人格化的绝对的概念对人类至关重要：印度教徒和佛教徒不得不接受奉爱（bhakti）中的人格化虔诚。但三位一体的范式或象征表明，人格化必须……超越了这一点，仅仅将上帝想象成放大版的人类，其行为和反应方式与我们自己非常相似，是不够的。

The doctrine of the Trinity has often been misunderstood in the Western world. People tend to imagine three divine figures or else ignore the doctrine altogether and identify “God” with the Father and make Jesus a divine friend—not quite on the same level. Muslims and Jews have also found the doctrine puzzling and even blasphemous. Yet we shall see that in both Judaism and Islam mystics developed remarkably similar conceptions of the divine. The idea of a kenosis, the self-emptying ecstasy of God, would, for example, be crucial in both Kabbalah and Sufism. In the Trinity, the Father transmits all that he is to the Son, giving up everything—even the possibility of expressing himself in another Word. Once that Word has been spoken, as it were, the Father remains silent: there is nothing that we can say about him, since the only God we know is the Logos or Son. The Father, therefore, has no identity, no “I” in the normal sense, and confounds our notion of personality. At the very source of Being is the Nothing glimpsed not only by Denys but also by Plotinus, Philo and even the Buddha. Since the Father is commonly presented as the End of the Christian quest, the Christian journey becomes a progress toward no place, no where and No One. The idea of a personal God or a personalized Absolute has been important to humanity: Hindus and Buddhists had to permit the personalistic devotionalism of bhakti. But the paradigm or symbol of the Trinity suggests that personalism must be transcended and that it is not enough to imagine God as man writ large, behaving and reacting in much the same way as we ourselves.

道成肉身的教义可以被视为消除偶像崇拜危险的另一种尝试。一旦“上帝”被视为一个完全独立于世俗之外的实在，他很容易沦为偶像和投射，使人类得以将自身的偏见和欲望外化并加以崇拜。其他宗教传统试图通过强调绝对与人类境况的某种关联来阻止这种情况的发生，例如梵我论。阿里乌斯——以及后来的聂斯托留和欧迪奇——都试图将耶稣定义为人或神，而他们之所以遭到抵制，部分原因正是因为这种将人性和神性割裂开来的倾向。诚然，他们的解决方案更为理性，但教条——而非宣讲——不应像诗歌或音乐那样，被完全可解释的事物所束缚。道成肉身的教义——正如阿塔纳修斯和马克西姆斯笨拙地表达的那样——试图阐明一个普遍的洞见，即“神”与人密不可分。在西方，由于道成肉身的教义并非以这种方式阐述，因此上帝往往处于人之外，成为与我们所知的世界不同的另一种现实。结果，人们很容易将这种“神”视为一种投射，而这种投射近年来已不再被认可。

The doctrine of the Incarnation can be seen as another attempt to neutralize the danger of idolatry. Once “God” is seen as a wholly other reality “out there,” he can easily become a mere idol and a projection, which enables human beings to externalize and worship their own prejudice and desires. Other religious traditions have attempted to prevent this by insisting that the Absolute is somehow bound up with the human condition, as in the Brahman-Atman paradigm. Arius—and later Nestorius and Eutyches—all wanted to make Jesus either human or divine, and they were resisted partly because of this tendency to keep humanity and divinity in separate spheres. True, their solutions were more rational, but dogma—as opposed to kerygma—should not be confined by the wholly explicable, any more than poetry or music. The doctrine of the Incarnation—as fumblingly expressed by Athanasius and Maximus—was an attempt to articulate the universal insight that “God” and man must be inseparable. In the West, where the Incarnation was not formulated in this way, there has been a tendency for God to remain external to man and an alternative reality to the world that we know. Consequently, it has been all too easy to make this “God” a projection, which has recently become discredited.

然而，通过将耶稣视为唯一的化身，我们看到基督徒采纳了一种排他性的宗教真理观念：耶稣是上帝赐予人类的最初也是最终的圣言，因此未来的启示显得多余。结果，就像犹太人一样，当七世纪阿拉伯出现一位先知，声称自己直接从上帝那里得到启示，并为他的子民带来了一部新的经文时，他们感到震惊。然而，这种新的一神论，最终被称为“伊斯兰教”，在中东和北非以惊人的速度传播开来。在这些地区（希腊化并非主流），许多热情的皈依者如释重负地放弃了希腊三位一体论——后者以一种他们难以理解的方式表达上帝的奥秘——转而接受了更具闪米特特色的神圣现实观。

Yet by making Jesus the only avatar, we have seen that Christians would adopt an exclusive notion of religious truth: Jesus was the first and last Word of God to the human race, rendering future revelation unnecessary. Consequently, like Jews, they were scandalized when a prophet arose in Arabia during the seventh century who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people. Yet the new version of monotheism, which eventually became known as “Islam,” spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many of its enthusiastic converts in these lands (where Hellenism was not on home ground) turned with relief from Greek Trinitarianism, which expressed the mystery of God in an idiom that was alien to them, and adopted a more Semitic notion of the divine reality.

5.

统一：伊斯兰教的真主

5

Unity: The God of Islam

我大约在公元610年，一位来自希贾兹地区繁荣的麦加城的阿拉伯商人，从未读过《圣经》，可能也从未听说过以赛亚、耶利米和以西结，却经历了一件与他们惊人相似的事情。穆罕默德·伊本·阿卜杜拉是麦加古莱什部落的成员，每年斋月期间，他都会带着家人前往城外的希拉山进行灵修。这在阿拉伯半岛的阿拉伯人中是一种常见的习俗。穆罕默德会在斋月期间向阿拉伯人的至高神祈祷，并向前来拜访他的穷人分发食物和施舍。他可能也会长时间地陷入焦虑的思考中。从他后来的经历中我们得知，尽管麦加近期取得了巨大的成功，但穆罕默德敏锐地察觉到城中存在着一种令人担忧的弊病。仅仅两代人之前，古莱什人和其他贝都因部落一样，在阿拉伯草原上过着艰苦的游牧生活：每一天都为了生存而苦苦挣扎。然而，在六世纪末，他们的贸易取得了巨大的成功，并将麦加打造成为阿拉伯最重要的定居点。他们如今的财富远超想象。然而，生活方式的剧变意味着旧有的部落价值观已被肆意横行、残酷无情的资本主义所取代。人们感到迷茫和不知所措。穆罕默德深知古莱什人正走在一条危险的道路上，他需要找到一种能够帮助他们适应新环境的意识形态。

IN ABOUT THE YEAR 610 an Arab merchant of the thriving city of Mecca in the Hijaz, who had never read the Bible and probably never heard of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, had an experience that was uncannily similar to theirs. Every year Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a member of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh, used to take his family to Mount Hira just outside the city to make a spiritual retreat during the month of Ramadan. This was quite a common practice among the Arabs of the peninsula. Muhammad would have spent the time praying to the High God of the Arabs and distributing food and alms to the poor who came to visit him during this sacred period. He probably also spent much time in anxious thought. We know from his later career that Muhammad was acutely aware of a worrying malaise in Mecca, despite its recent spectacular success. Only two generations earlier, the Quraysh had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each day had required a grim struggle for survival. During the last years of the sixth century, however, they had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad knew that the Quraysh were on a dangerous course and needed to find an ideology that would help them to adjust to their new conditions.

当时，任何政治解决方案往往都带有宗教性质。穆罕默德意识到古莱什人正在利用金钱创造一种新的宗教。这并不令人惊讶，因为他们肯定认为……他们新获得的财富使他们“摆脱”了游牧生活的种种危险，使他们免受阿拉伯草原上普遍存在的营养不良和部落冲突的侵扰——在阿拉伯草原上，每个贝都因部落每天都面临着灭绝的威胁。如今，他们几乎吃饱了，并将麦加打造成了国际贸易和金融中心。他们觉得自己掌握了命运，有些人甚至似乎相信，财富会赋予他们某种永生。但穆罕默德认为，这种新的自给自足（istaqa）的风气将导致部落的瓦解。在古老的游牧时代，部落必须高于个人：部落的每个成员都明白，他们彼此依赖才能生存。因此，他们有责任照顾族群中贫困和弱势的群体。如今，个人主义取代了集体主义的理想，竞争成为常态。个人开始积累财富，对弱势的古莱什人漠不关心。各个氏族，或者说部落中较小的家族群体，为了瓜分麦加的财富而互相争斗，一些最不成功的氏族（例如穆罕默德自己的哈希姆氏族）甚至感到自己的生存都受到了威胁。穆罕默德深信，除非古莱什人学会将另一种超越世俗的价值观置于生活的中心，并克服他们的自私和贪婪，否则他的部落将在内战中走向道德和政治的双重崩溃。

At this time, any political solution tended to be of a religious nature. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were making a new religion out of money. This was hardly surprising, because they must have felt that their new wealth had “saved’ them from the perils of the nomadic life, cushioning them from the malnutrition and tribal violence that were endemic to the steppes of Arabia, where each Bedouin tribe daily faced the possibility of extinction. They now had almost enough to eat and were making Mecca an international center of trade and high finance. They felt that they had become the masters of their own fate, and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency (istaqa) would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival. Consequently they had a duty to take care of the poor and vulnerable people of their ethnic group. Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm. Individuals were starting to build personal fortunes and took no heed of the weaker Qurayshis. Each of the clans, or smaller family groups of the tribe, fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca, and some of the least successful clans (like Muhammad’s own clan of Hashim) felt that their very survival was in jeopardy. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egotism and greed, his tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife.

在阿拉伯半岛的其他地区，情况同样严峻。几个世纪以来，希贾兹和内志地区的贝都因部落为了争夺基本生活必需品而相互激烈竞争。为了帮助人们培养生存所必需的社群精神，阿拉伯人发展出一种名为“穆鲁瓦”（muruwah）的意识形态，它承担了许多宗教的功能。从传统意义上讲，阿拉伯人对宗教并不热衷。他们信奉异教神祇，并在神龛前进行祭拜，但他们并没有发展出一套神话体系来解释这些神祇和圣地与精神生活之间的关联。他们没有来世的概念，而是相信“达尔”（darh，可译为“时间”或“命运”）至高无上——在这样一个死亡率极高的社会里，这种态度或许至关重要。西方学者通常将“muruwah ”翻译为“男子气概”，但它的含义远不止于此：它意味着战场上的勇气、苦难中的耐心和忍耐，以及对部落的绝对忠诚。“muruwah”的美德要求阿拉伯人无论个人安危都要立即服从其酋长或首领的命令；他必须恪守骑士精神，为部落复仇，惩罚任何对他的不公。为了保护部落中较为弱势的成员，酋长会平等地分配部落的财富和财产，并为族人复仇，杀死凶手所在部落的成员。在这里，我们最清晰地看到了社群伦理：在像前伊斯兰时代的阿拉伯这样的社会里，个人可以消失得无影无踪，因此没有义务惩罚凶手本人。相反，出于这种目的，敌对部落的成员之间是等同的。在这样一个没有中央权威、每个部落都各自为政、没有类似现代警察部队的地区，血仇或世仇是确保社会安全的唯一途径。如果酋长不进行报复，他的部落就会失去威望，其他部落也会肆无忌惮地杀害其成员。因此，血仇是一种粗暴而直接的正义形式，这意味着任何一个部落都无法轻易凌驾于其他部落之上。这也意味着各个部落很容易陷入无法停止的暴力循环，如果人们觉得所采取的报复与最初的冒犯不成比例，那么一次复仇就会导致另一次复仇。

In the rest of Arabia the situation was also bleak. For centuries the Bedouin tribes of the regions of the Hijaz and Najd had lived in fierce competition with one another for the basic necessities of life. To help the people cultivate the communal spirit that was essential for survival, the Arabs had evolved an ideology called muruwah, which fulfilled many of the functions of religion. In the conventional sense, the Arabs had little time for religion. There was a pagan pantheon of deities and the Arabs worshipped at their shrines, but they had not developed a mythology that explained the relevance of these gods and holy places to the life of the spirit. They had no notion of an afterlife but believed instead that darh, which can be translated as “time” or “fate,” was supreme—an attitude that was probably essential in a society where the mortality rate was so high. Western scholars often translate muruwah as “manliness” but it had a far wider range of significance: it meant courage in battle, patience and endurance in suffering and absolute dedication to the tribe. The virtues of muruwah required an Arab to obey his sayyid or chief at a second’s notice, regardless of his personal safety; he had to dedicate himself to the chivalrous duties of avenging any wrong committed against the tribe and protecting its more vulnerable members. To ensure the survival of the tribe, the sayyid shared its wealth and possessions equally and avenged the death of a single one of his people by killing a member of the murderer’s tribe. It is here that we see the communal ethic most clearly: there was no duty to punish the killer himself because an individual could vanish without trace in a society like pre-Islamic Arabia. Instead one member of the enemy tribe was equivalent to another for such purposes. The vendetta or blood feud was the only way of ensuring a modicum of social security in a region where there was no central authority, where every tribal group was a law unto itself and where there was nothing comparable to a modern police force. If a chief failed to retaliate, his tribe would lose respect and others would feel free to kill its members with impunity. The vendetta was thus a rough-and-ready form of justice which meant that no one tribe could easily gain ascendancy over any of the others. It also meant that the various tribes could easily become involved in an unstoppable cycle of violence, in which one vendetta would lead to another if people felt that the revenge taken was disproportionate to the original offense.

尽管穆鲁瓦制度无疑残酷无情，但它也拥有诸多优势。它倡导一种根深蒂固的平等主义，以及对物质财富的漠视——这在物资匮乏的地区或许至关重要：慷慨大方的风尚是重要的美德，教导阿拉伯人不必为明日担忧。正如我们将看到的，这些品质在伊斯兰教中变得至关重要。穆鲁瓦制度在几个世纪里为阿拉伯人提供了良好的环境，但到了六世纪，它已无法满足现代社会的需求。在伊斯兰教兴起前的最后阶段，穆斯林称之为“蒙昧时代”（ jahiliyyah），当时似乎普遍存在不满和精神上的躁动。阿拉伯人被萨珊波斯和拜占庭两大帝国四面包围。现代思想开始从定居之地渗透到阿拉伯半岛；前往叙利亚或伊拉克的商人带回了关于文明奇迹的故事。

Brutal as it undoubtedly was, however, muruwah had many strengths. It encouraged a deep and strong egalitarianism and an indifference to material goods which, again, was probably essential in a region where there were not enough of the essentials to go round: the cults of largesse and generosity were important virtues and taught the Arabs to take no heed for the morrow. These qualities would become very important in Islam, as we shall see. Muruwah had served the Arabs well for centuries, but by the sixth century it was no longer able to answer the conditions of modernity. During the last phase of the pre-Islamic period, which Muslims call the jahiliyyah (the time of ignorance), there seems to have been widespread dissatisfaction and spiritual restlessness. The Arabs were surrounded on all sides by the two mighty empires of Sassanid Persia and Byzantium. Modern ideas were beginning to penetrate Arabia from the settled lands; merchants who traveled into Syria or Iraq brought back stories of the wonders of civilization.

然而，阿拉伯人似乎注定要永远处于野蛮状态。各部落之间战乱不断，使他们无法整合微薄的资源，也无法成为他们隐约意识到的那种统一的阿拉伯民族。他们无法掌握自己的命运，也无法建立属于自己的文明。相反，他们始终处于列强的剥削之下：事实上，阿拉伯南部较为肥沃和发达的地区……如今，也门（得益于季风降雨）已沦为波斯的一个省份。与此同时，渗透到该地区的新思想带来了个人主义的萌芽，动摇了原有的社群精神。例如，基督教的来世教义将每个人的永恒命运视为神圣的价值：这与部落的理想如何调和呢？部落的理想将个人置于群体之下，并坚持认为一个人的永生仅仅在于部落的存续。

Yet it seemed that the Arabs were doomed to perpetual barbarism. The tribes were involved in constant warfare, which made it impossible for them to pool their meager resources and become the united Arab people that they were dimly aware of being. They could not take their destiny into their own hands and found a civilization of their own. Instead they were constantly open to exploitation by the great powers: indeed, the more fertile and sophisticated region of Southern Arabia in what is now Yemen (which had the benefit of the monsoon rains) had become a mere province of Persia. At the same time, the new ideas that were infiltrating the region brought intimations of individualism that undermined the old communal ethos. The Christian doctrine of the afterlife, for example, made the eternal fate of each individual a sacred value: how could that be squared with the tribal ideal which subordinated the individual to the group and insisted that a man or woman’s sole immortality lay in the survival of the tribe?

穆罕默德是一位才华横溢的人物。公元632年他去世时，已成功地将阿拉伯半岛几乎所有部落融合为一个新的统一社群，即乌玛（Ummah）。他为阿拉伯人带来了一种独特的精神信仰，这种信仰完美契合了他们自身的传统，并激发了他们巨大的力量。短短一百年间，他们便建立了自己的庞大帝国，疆域从喜马拉雅山脉延伸至比利牛斯山脉，并开创了一种独特的文明。然而，当穆罕默德在公元610年斋月期间于希拉山顶的小山洞中静坐祈祷时，他或许无法预见到如此惊人的成就。与许多阿拉伯人一样，穆罕默德也相信，古阿拉伯万神殿中的至高神——真主（al-Lah，其名称意为“上帝”）——与犹太教和基督教所敬拜的上帝是同一位神。他也相信，只有这位真主的先知才能解决他的人民所面临的问题，但他从未想过自己会成为那位先知。事实上，阿拉伯人遗憾地意识到，尽管真主的圣殿自古以来就矗立在他们中间，但真主却从未派遣过先知或赐予他们自己的经文。到了七世纪，大多数阿拉伯人开始相信，位于麦加中心的巨大立方体圣殿——克尔白（显然历史悠久），最初是献给真主的，尽管如今纳巴泰神胡巴勒（Hubal）在此掌管。所有麦加人都为克尔白感到无比自豪，因为它是阿拉伯半岛最重要的圣地。每年，来自阿拉伯半岛各地的阿拉伯人都会前往麦加朝觐，在数日内完成传统的朝圣仪式。在克尔白周围的圣地——圣殿内，一切暴力行为都被禁止，因此，在麦加，阿拉伯人可以彼此和平贸易，因为他们知道，昔日部落间的敌对关系暂时中止了。古莱什人深知，若没有克尔白，他们绝不可能取得商业上的成功；他们在其他部落中的威望，很大程度上取决于他们对克尔白的守护以及对古老圣物的保存。然而，尽管真主显然对古莱什人格外眷顾，但他从未……派遣像亚伯拉罕、摩西或耶稣那样的使者去教导他们，而阿拉伯人自己语言中却没有经文。

Muhammad was a man of exceptional genius. When he died in 632, he had managed to bring nearly all the tribes of Arabia into a new united community, or ummah. He had brought the Arabs a spirituality that was uniquely suited to their own traditions and which unlocked such reserves of power that within a hundred years they had established their own great empire, which stretched from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees, and founded a unique civilization. Yet as Muhammad sat in prayer in the tiny cave at the summit of Mount Hira during his Ramadan retreat of 610, he could not have envisaged such phenomenal success. Like many of the Arabs, Muhammad had come to believe that al-Lah, the High God of the ancient Arabian pantheon, whose name simply meant “the God,” was identical to the God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians. He also believed that only a prophet of this God could solve the problems of his people, but he never believed for one moment that he was going to be that prophet. Indeed, the Arabs were unhappily aware that al-Lah had never sent them a prophet or a scripture of their own, even though they had had his shrine in their midst from time immemorial. By the seventh century, most Arabs had come to believe that the Kabah, the massive cube-shaped shrine in the heart of Mecca, which was clearly of great antiquity, had originally been dedicated to al-Lah, even though at present the Nabatean deity Hubal presided there. All Meccans were fiercely proud of the Kabah, which was the most important holy place in Arabia. Each year Arabs from all over the peninsula made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, performing the traditional rites over a period of several days. All violence was forbidden in the sanctuary, the sacred area around the Kabah, so that in Mecca the Arabs could trade with one another peacefully, knowing that old tribal hostilities were temporarily in abeyance. The Quraysh knew that without the sanctuary they could never have achieved their mercantile success and that a great deal of their prestige among the other tribes depended upon their guardianship of the Kabah and upon their preservation of its ancient sanctities. Yet though al-Lah had clearly singled the Quraysh out for his special favor, he had never sent them a messenger like Abraham, Moses or Jesus, and the Arabs had no scripture in their own language.

因此，当时普遍存在一种精神上的自卑感。阿拉伯人接触到的犹太人和基督徒常常嘲讽他们是野蛮人，没有得到上帝的启示。阿拉伯人对这些拥有他们所缺乏的知识的人既感到愤恨，又心存敬畏。尽管阿拉伯人承认犹太教和基督教这种进步的宗教形式优于他们传统的异教信仰，但它们在该地区的发展却十分缓慢。在麦加以北的叶斯里卜（后来的麦地那）和法达克定居点，有一些来历不明的犹太部落，而波斯帝国和拜占庭帝国交界地带的一些北部部落则皈依了基督一性论或聂斯托利派基督教。然而，贝都因人桀骜不驯，决心不效仿也门同胞，臣服于列强统治。他们深知波斯人和拜占庭人都曾利用犹太教和基督教来推进其在该地区的帝国野心。他们或许也本能地意识到，随着自身传统的逐渐消逝，他们已经遭受了足够的文化冲击。他们最不需要的就是一种外来的意识形态，一种用陌生的语言和传统包装起来的意识形态。

There was, therefore, a widespread feeling of spiritual inferiority. Those Jews and Christians with whom the Arabs came in contact used to taunt them for being a barbarous people who had received no revelation from God. The Arabs felt a mingled resentment and respect for these people who had knowledge that they did not. Judaism and Christianity had made little headway in the region, even though the Arabs acknowledged that this progressive form of religion was superior to their own traditional paganism. There were some Jewish tribes of doubtful provenance in the settlements of Yathrib (later Medina) and Fadak, to the north of Mecca, and some of the northern tribes on the borderland between the Persian and Byzantine empires had converted to Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity. Yet the Bedouin were fiercely independent, were determined not to come under the rule of the great powers like their brethren in Yemen and were acutely aware that both the Persians and the Byzantines had used the religions of Judaism and Christianity to promote their imperial designs in the region. They were probably also instinctively aware that they had suffered enough cultural dislocation, as their own traditions eroded. The last thing they needed was a foreign ideology, couched in alien languages and traditions.

一些阿拉伯人似乎试图寻找一种更为中立的一神论形式，不受帝国主义的影响。早在五世纪，巴勒斯坦基督教历史学家索佐梅诺斯就记载，叙利亚的一些阿拉伯人重新发现了他们所谓的亚伯拉罕的真正宗教。亚伯拉罕生活在​​上帝颁布《托拉》或《福音书》之前，因此他既非犹太教徒也非基督教徒。在穆罕默德接受先知召唤前不久，他的第一位传记作者穆罕默德·伊本·伊斯哈格（卒于公元767年）记载，麦加的四位古莱什人决定寻求哈尼菲耶教派，即亚伯拉罕的真正宗教。一些西方学者认为，这个小小的哈尼菲耶教派只是一个虔诚的虚构，象征着蒙昧时代（jahiliyyah）的精神躁动，但它必然有其事实依据。四位哈尼夫中有三位为早期穆斯林所熟知：乌拜杜拉·伊本·贾赫什是穆罕默德的堂弟；瓦拉卡·伊本·瑙法尔后来皈依基督教，是穆罕默德最早的精神导师之一；宰德·伊本·阿姆尔是欧麦尔·伊本·哈塔卜的叔父，欧麦尔是穆罕默德最亲密的伙伴之一，也是伊斯兰帝国的第二任哈里发。据说，有一天，在离开麦加前往叙利亚和伊拉克寻找亚伯拉罕的宗教之前，宰德站在克尔白旁，倚靠着圣殿，向众人讲述着……古莱什人正按着古老的方式绕着它进行仪式性的环行，他们说道：“古莱什人啊！以掌握宰德灵魂的主宰起誓，你们当中除了我之外，没有一个人信奉易卜拉欣的宗教。”然后他悲伤地补充道：“真主啊！如果我知道您希望人们如何敬拜您，我一定会那样敬拜您；但我不知道。^”

Some Arabs seem to have attempted to discover a more neutral form of monotheism not tainted by imperialistic associations. As early as the fifth century, the Palestinian Christian historian Sozomenos tells us that some of the Arabs in Syria had rediscovered what they called the authentic religion of Abraham, who had lived before God had sent either the Torah or the Gospel and who was, therefore, neither a Jew nor a Christian. Shortly before Muhammad received his own prophetic call, his first biographer, Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767), tells us that four of the Quraysh of Mecca had decided to seek the hanifiyyah, the true religion of Abraham. Some Western scholars have argued that this little hanifiyyah sect is a pious fiction, symbolizing the spiritual restlessness of the jahiliyyah, but it must have some factual basis. Three of the four hanifs were well known to the first Muslims: Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was Muhammad’s cousin, Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who eventually became a Christian, was one of his earliest spiritual advisers, and Zayd ibn Amr was the uncle of Umar ibn al-Khattab, one of Muhammad’s closest companions and the second caliph of the Islamic empire. There is a story that one day, before he had left Mecca to search in Syria and Iraq for the religion of Abraham, Zayd had been standing by the Kabah, leaning against the shrine and telling the Quraysh who were making the ritual circumambulations around it in the time-honored way: “O Quraysh, by him in whose hand is the soul of Zayd, not one of you follows the religion of Abraham but I.” Then he added sadly, “O God, if I knew how you wish to be worshipped I would so worship you; but I do not know.”¹

宰德对神圣启示的渴望在公元610年斋月的第十七夜于希拉山得以实现。穆罕默德从睡梦中惊醒，感到自己被一股强大的神圣力量所包围。后来，他用独特的阿拉伯语描述了这段难以言喻的经历。他说，一位天使出现在他面前，并简短地命令他：“诵读！”（iqra！）如同那些常常不愿念诵真主圣言的希伯来先知一样，穆罕默德拒绝了，并抗议道：“我不是诵经者！”他不是阿拉伯那些自称能诵读神谕的狂热预言家。但穆罕默德说，天使只是用一种强大的力量将他紧紧包裹，让他感觉仿佛所有的呼吸都被挤压殆尽。就在他感觉自己再也无法忍受的时候，天使放开了他，再次命令他“诵读！”（iqra！）。穆罕默德再次拒绝，天使再次拥抱他，直到他感到自己已达到忍耐的极限。最终，在第三次令人胆寒的拥抱之后，穆罕默德发现自己口中吐出了新经文的第一句话：

Zayd’s longing for a divine revelation was fulfilled on Mount Hira in 610 on the seventeenth night of Ramadan, when Muhammad was torn from sleep and felt himself enveloped by a devastating divine presence. Later he explained this ineffable experience in distinctively Arabian terms. He said that an angel had appeared to him and given him a curt command: “Recite!” (iqra!) Like the Hebrew prophets who were often reluctant to utter the Word of God, Muhammad refused, protesting, “I am not a reciter!” He was no kahin, one of the ecstatic soothsayers of Arabia who claimed to recite inspired oracles. But, Muhammad said, the angel simply enveloped him in an overpowering embrace, so that he felt as if all the breath was being squeezed from his body. Just as he felt he could bear it no longer, the angel released him and again commanded him to “Recite!” (iqra!). Again Muhammad refused and again the angel embraced him until he felt he had reached the limits of his endurance. Finally, at the end of a third terrifying embrace, Muhammad found the first words of a new scripture pouring from his mouth:

上帝的圣言第一次以阿拉伯语传达，这部经文最终被称为《古兰经》：诵读。

The word of God had been spoken for the first time in the Arabic language, and this scripture would ultimately be called the qur’an: the Recitation.

穆罕默德惊恐万分地回过神来，厌恶至极，他不敢相信自己竟然沦落为一个声名狼藉的卡欣（kahin），人们如果骆驼走失就会向他求助。据说卡欣是被精灵（jinni）附身的，精灵被认为是游荡在大地上的妖精之一，它们反复无常，会误导人们。诗人也相信自己被自己的精灵附身。例如，叶斯里卜的诗人哈桑·伊本·萨比特（Hassan ibn Thabit，后来皈依伊斯兰教）就说，当他获得诗歌天赋时，他的精灵出现在他面前，把他摔倒在地，强迫他吐出灵感迸发的诗句。这是穆罕默德唯一熟悉的灵感来源。想到自己可能已经变成了马吉努（majnun，精灵附身者），他感到无比绝望，甚至不想活了。他极其厌恶卡欣（kahin ，神谕者），他们的神谕通常都是晦涩难懂的胡言乱语，他总是非常谨慎地区分《古兰经》和传统的阿拉伯诗歌。现在，他冲出山洞，决心从山顶纵身跃下，结束自己的生命。但在山坡上，他又看到了一个幻象，后来他认定那是天使加百列：

Muhammad came to himself in terror and revulsion, horrified to think that he might have become a mere disreputable kahin whom people’ consulted if one of their camels went missing. A kahin was supposedly possessed by a jinni, one of the sprites who were thought to haunt the landscape and who could be capricious and lead people into error. Poets also believed that they were possessed by their personal jinni. Thus Hassan ibn Thabit, a poet of Yathrib who later became a Muslim, says that when he received his poetic vocation his jinni had appeared to him, thrown him to the ground and forced the inspired words from his mouth. This was the only form of inspiration that was familiar to Muhammad, and the thought that he might have become majnun, jinni-possessed, filled him with such despair that he no longer wished to live. He thoroughly despised the kahins, whose oracles were usually unintelligible mumbo jumbo, and was always very careful to distinguish the Koran from conventional Arabic poetry. Now, rushing from the cave, he resolved to fling himself from the summit to his death. But on the mountainside he had another vision of a being which, later, he identified with the angel Gabriel:

在伊斯兰教中，加百列常被视为启示之灵，是上帝与人沟通的媒介。这并非一位容貌俊美、充满自然气息的天使，而是一种无处不在、令人无法逃脱的强大存在。穆罕默德曾体验过那种令人震撼的神圣现实，希伯来先知称之为“卡多什”（kaddosh），即神圣，是上帝令人敬畏的异质性。他们也曾在经历这种体验时感到濒临死亡，身心都处于极限状态。但与以赛亚或耶利米不同，穆罕默德没有任何既定传统的慰藉可以依靠。这种可怕的经历似乎毫无预兆地降临在他身上，使他陷入了深深的震惊之中。在极度的痛苦中，他本能地转向了妻子赫蒂彻。

In Islam Gabriel is often identified with the Holy Spirit of revelation, the means by which God communicates with men. This was no pretty naturalistic angel, but an overwhelming ubiquitous presence from which escape was impossible. Muhammad had had that overpowering apprehension of numinous reality, which the Hebrew prophets had called kaddosh, holiness, the terrifying otherness of God. They too had felt near to death and at a physical and psychological extremity when they experienced it. But unlike Isaiah or Jeremiah, Muhammad had none of the consolations of an established tradition to support him. The terrifying experience seemed to have fallen upon him out of the blue and left him in a state of profound shock. In his anguish, he turned instinctively to his wife, Khadija.

穆罕默德手脚并用地爬行，浑身颤抖，扑到赫蒂彻的怀里。“遮住我！遮住我！”他哭喊着，恳求她保护他免受神圣力量的侵扰。恐惧稍稍消退后，穆罕默德问她，自己是否真的变成了马吉努（majnun，意为“疯子”），赫蒂彻连忙安慰他：“你对亲人仁慈体贴，帮助穷人和孤苦伶仃的人，分担他们的重担。你努力恢复你的人民已经失去的高尚道德品质，你款待客人，帮助那些身处困境的人。这不可能，我的孩子！” ^⁴真主不会如此随意行事。赫蒂彻建议他们去咨询她的堂兄瓦拉卡·伊本·瑙法尔，他现在是一位基督徒，精通经文。瓦拉卡毫不怀疑：穆罕默德确实从摩西的上帝那里得到了启示。先知们认为他是真主派往阿拉伯人的使者。最终，经过数年时间，穆罕默德确信事实的确如此，于是开始向古莱什人传教，并用他们的语言为他们带来了一部经文。

Crawling on his hands and knees, trembling violently, Muhammad flung himself into her lap. “Cover me! cover me!” he cried, begging her to shield him from the divine presence. When the fear had abated somewhat, Muhammad asked her whether he really had become majnun, and Khadija hastened to reassure him: “You are kind and considerate towards your kin. You help the poor and forlorn and bear their burdens. You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress. This cannot be, my dear!”⁴ God did not act in such an arbitrary way. Khadija suggested that they consult her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, now a Christian and learned in the scriptures. Waraqa had no doubts at all: Muhammad had received a revelation from the God of Moses and the prophets and had become the divine envoy to the Arabs. Eventually, after a period of several years, Muhammad was convinced that this was indeed the case and began to preach to the Quraysh, bringing them a scripture in their own language.

然而，与《托拉》不同，《托拉》据圣经记载是在西奈山上一次性启示给摩西的，而《古兰经》则是在二十三年的时间里，逐行逐节地启示给穆罕默德的。这些启示始终是痛苦的经历。“我每次接受启示，都感觉自己的灵魂仿佛被撕裂，”穆罕默德晚年说道。⁵^他必须全神贯注地聆听神圣的话语，努力理解那些并非总是以清晰的语言形式呈现的景象和意义。他说，有时神圣信息的内容很清晰：他似乎看到了加百列，听到了加百列所说的话。但有时，启示却令人痛苦地难以言表：“有时它像钟声的回响一样传入我的耳中，这对我来说是最难熬的；当我意识到其中的信息时，回响便会消散。” ⁶古典时期早期的传记作家常常描写他全神贯注地聆听我们或许应该称之为无意识的东西，就像诗人描述“聆听”一首诗的过程一样，这首诗正逐渐从他心灵深处的隐秘角落浮现，以一种似乎与他自身神秘分离的权威和完整性向世人宣告。在《古兰经》中，真主告诉穆罕默德要仔细聆听那看似不连贯的意义，并怀着华兹华斯所说的“智慧的被动”。7^他不应急于强加文字或某种特定的概念意义，直到真正的意义在恰当的时机显现：

Unlike the Torah, however, which according to the biblical account was revealed to Moses in one session on Mount Sinai, the Koran was revealed to Muhammad bit by bit, line by line and verse by verse over a period of twenty-three years. The revelations continued to be a painful experience. “Never once did I receive a revelation without feeling that my soul was being torn away from me,” Muhammad said in later years.⁵ He had to listen to the divine words intently, struggling to make sense of a vision and significance that did not always come to him in a clear, verbal form. Sometimes, he said, the content of the divine message was clear: he seemed to see Gabriel and heard what he was saying. But at other times the revelation was distressingly inarticulate: “Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.”⁶ The early biographers of the classical period often show him listening intently to what we should perhaps call the unconscious, rather as a poet describes the process of “listening” to a poem that is gradually surfacing from the hidden recesses of his mind, declaring itself with an authority and integrity that seem mysteriously separate from him. In the Koran, God tells Muhammad to listen to the incoherent meaning carefully and with what Wordsworth would call “a wise passiveness.”⁷ He must not rush to force words or a particular conceptual significance upon it until the true meaning revealed itself in its own good time:

如同所有创造过程一样，这并非易事。穆罕默德常常进入一种恍惚状态，有时似乎会失去意识；他常常汗流浃背，即使在寒冷的天气里也是如此；他常常感到一种如同悲伤般的内心沉重感，驱使他将头埋在双膝之间——一些同时代的犹太神秘主义者在进入另一种意识状态时也会采用这种姿势——尽管穆罕默德不可能知道这一点。

Like all creativity, it was a difficult process. Muhammad used to enter a tranced state and sometimes seemed to lose consciousness; he used to sweat profusely, even on a cold day, and often felt an interior heaviness like grief that impelled him to lower his head between his knees, a position adopted by some contemporary Jewish mystics when they entered an alternative state of consciousness—though Muhammad could not have known this.

穆罕默德感到启示如此巨大压力，这并不奇怪：他不仅要为他的人民寻求一种全新的政治解决方案，还要创作一部有史以来最伟大的精神和文学经典之一。他相信自己正在用阿拉伯语传达上帝不可言喻的圣言，因为《古兰经》对于伊斯兰教的精神信仰而言，正如耶稣（道）对于基督教一样至关重要。我们对穆罕默德的了解比对任何其他主要宗教的创始人都要多，而在《古兰经》中，我们可以相当准确地确定各个章节的成书日期，从中我们可以看到他的愿景是如何逐步演变和发展的，其视野也变得越来越普世。他起初并没有预见到自己必须完成的所有使命，但随着他对事件内在逻辑的回应，这些使命逐渐向他揭示出来。可以说，《古兰经》是一部与伊斯兰教起源同时期的注释，这在宗教史上是独一无二的。在这部神圣的经典中，真主似乎在对当时的局势发展进行评述：他回应了穆罕默德的一些批评者，解释了早期穆斯林社群内部的战争或冲突的意义，并指出了人类生活的神圣层面。这部经典并非按照我们今天所读的顺序启示给穆罕默德，而是以一种更为随机的方式，随着事件的发生和他对事件深层含义的领悟而逐渐显现。每当新的章节被揭示，不识字的穆罕默德便将其朗诵出来，穆斯林们则将其背诵下来，少数识字的人则将其记录下来。穆罕默德去世约二十年后，第一部官方的启示汇编问世。编纂者将最长的章节放在开头，最短的放在结尾。这种安排并非如表面看起来那样随意，因为《古兰经》既非叙事作品，也非论证作品，无需遵循特定的顺序。相反，它探讨了诸多主题：真主在自然界的存在、先知的生平以及末日审判。对于无法领略阿拉伯语非凡之美的西方人来说，《古兰经》显得枯燥乏味、重复冗长，似乎总是在重复同样的内容。然而，《古兰经》并非为私人阅读而作，而是用于宗教仪式的诵读。当穆斯林在清真寺聆听经文诵读时，他们会想起自己信仰的所有核心教义。

It is not surprising that Muhammad found the revelations such an immense strain: not only was he working through to an entirely new political solution for his people, but he was composing one of the great spiritual and literary classics of all time. He believed that he was putting the ineffable Word of God into Arabic, for the Koran is as central to the spirituality of Islam as Jesus, the Logos, is to Christianity. We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other major religion, and in the Koran, whose various suras or chapters can be dated with reasonable accuracy, we can see how his vision gradually evolved and developed, becoming ever more universal in scope. He did not see at the outset all that he had to accomplish, but this was revealed to him little by little, as he responded to the inner logic of events. In the Koran we have, as it were, a contemporaneous commentary on the beginnings of Islam that is unique in the history of religion. In this sacred book, God seems to comment on the developing situation: he answers some of Muhammad’s critics, explains the significance of a battle or a conflict within the early Muslim community and points to the divine dimension of human life. It did not come to Muhammad in the order we read today but in a more random manner, as events dictated and as he listened to their deeper meaning. As each new segment was revealed, Muhammad, who could neither read nor write, recited it aloud, the Muslims learned it by heart and those few who were literate wrote it down. Some twenty years after Muhammad’s death, the first official compilation of the revelations was made. The editors put the longest suras at the beginning and the shortest at the end. This arrangement is not as arbitrary as it might appear, because the Koran is neither a narrative nor an argument that needs a sequential order. Instead, it reflects on various themes: God’s presence in the natural world, the lives of the prophets or the Last Judgment. To a Westerner, who cannot appreciate the extraordinary beauty of the Arabic, the Koran seems boring and repetitive. It seems to go over the same ground again and again. But the Koran was not meant for private perusal but for liturgical recitation. When Muslims hear a sura chanted in the mosque, they are reminded of all the central tenets of their faith.

穆罕默德在麦加开始传教时，对自己的角色只有很谦逊的认识。他并不认为自己是在创立一种新的普世宗教，而是将古老的独一真主宗教带给古莱什人。起初，他甚至没有想过要向其他阿拉伯部落传教，而只是向麦加及其周边地区的人们传教。他没有建立神权政体的梦想，甚至可能根本不知道神权政体是什么：他本人不应该参与任何政治活动^。他身处城中，却只是城中的纳迪尔（nadhir），即警告者。^真主派遣他来警告古莱什人他们所处的危险境地。然而，他早期的信息并非充满厄运，而是充满希望的喜讯。穆罕默德无需向古莱什人证明上帝的存在。他们都深信真主的存在，真主是天地万物的创造者，而且大多数人认为他就是犹太教徒和基督教徒所敬拜的上帝。他的存在被视为理所当然。正如真主在《古兰经》早期的一章经文中对穆罕默德所说：

When Muhammad began to preach in Mecca, he had only a modest conception of his role. He did not believe that he was founding a new universal religion but saw himself bringing the old religion of the one God to the Quraysh, At first he did not even think that he should preach to the other Arab tribes but only to the people of Mecca and its environs.⁹ He had no dreams of founding a theocracy and would probably not have known what a theocracy was: he himself should have no political function in the city but was simply its nadhir, the Warner.¹⁰ Al-Lah had sent him to warn the Quraysh of the perils of their situation. His early message was not doom-laden, however. It was a joyful message of hope. Muhammad did not have to prove the existence of God to the Quraysh. They all believed implicitly in al-Lah, who was the creator of heaven and earth, and most believed him to be the God worshipped by the Jews and Christians. His existence was taken for granted. As God says to Muhammad in an early sura of the Koran:

问题在于古莱什人没有认真思考这种信仰的后果。正如最初的启示所明确指出的，上帝用一滴精液创造了他们每一个人；他们的食物和生活必需品都依赖于上帝，然而他们仍然自认为宇宙的中心，这种不切实际的狂妄（yatqa）和自给自足（istaqa）¹²完全忽视了他们作为体面阿拉伯社会成员的责任。

The trouble was that the Quraysh were not thinking through the implications of this belief. God had created each one of them from a drop of semen, as the very first revelation had made clear; they depended upon God for their food and sustenance, and yet they still regarded themselves as the center of the universe in an unrealistic presumption (yatqa) and self-sufficiency (istaqa)¹² that took no account of their responsibilities as members of a decent Arab society.

因此，《古兰经》的早期经文都鼓励古莱什人意识到真主的仁慈，他们无论走到哪里都能看到这种仁慈。他们就会明白，尽管他们取得了新的成功，但他们仍然欠真主多少恩惠，并感激他们对自然秩序创造者的完全依赖：

Consequently the early verses of the Koran all encourage the Quraysh to become aware of God’s benevolence, which they can see wherever they look. They will then realize how many things they still owe to him, despite their new success, and appreciate their utter dependency upon the Creator of the natural order:

因此，上帝的存在毋庸置疑。在《古兰经》中，“不信者”（kafir bi na'mat al-Lah）并非我们通常意义上的无神论者，即不相信上帝的人，而是指对上帝忘恩负义的人，他们明明知道自己应该得到什么，却出于一种扭曲的忘恩负义的精神拒绝尊敬上帝。

The existence of God is not in question, therefore. In the Koran an “unbeliever” (kafir bi na’mat al-Lah) is not an atheist in our sense of the word, somebody who does not believe in God, but one who is ungrateful to him, who can see quite clearly what is owing to God but refuses to honor him in a spirit of perverse ingratitude.

《古兰经》并没有教导古莱什人任何新的东西。事实上，它不断地声称自己是对已知事物的“提醒”，并将其更加清晰地呈现出来。《古兰经》经常以“你们难道没有看到……吗？”或“你们难道没有思考过……吗？”之类的短语来引出一个主题。真主的圣言并非高高在上地颁布任意的命令，而是在与古莱什人进行对话。例如，它提醒他们，克尔白——真主的殿堂——在很大程度上促成了他们的成功，而这在某种意义上实际上是归功于真主。古莱什人喜爱围绕圣地进行仪式性的环行，但当他们将自身和物质上的成功置于生活的中心时，他们便忘记了这些古老仪式的意义。他们应该关注自然界中真主的良善和力量的“迹象”（ ayat ）。如果他们不能在自己的社会中重现上帝的仁慈，他们就会与事物的真谛脱节。因此，穆罕默德要求他的皈依者每天两次进行礼拜（萨拉特）。这种外在的姿态有助于穆斯林培养内在的修养，并重新调整他们的生活方向。最终，穆罕默德的宗教被称为伊斯兰教，这是每个皈依者被期望向真主（安拉）做出的存在主义式的臣服：穆斯林是指将自己的全部生命奉献给造物主的人。当古莱什人看到这些最初的穆斯林进行礼拜时，他们感到震惊：他们无法接受一个拥有数百年骄傲的贝都因人独立历史的傲慢的古莱什部落成员，竟然会像奴隶一样匍匐在地。穆斯林不得不退到城外的山谷中秘密地进行礼拜。古莱什人的反应表明，穆罕默德对他们的精神状态有着精准的洞察。

The Koran was not teaching the Quraysh anything new. Indeed, it constantly claims to be “a reminder” of things known already, which it throws into more lucid relief. Frequently the Koran introduces a topic with a phrase like: “Have you not seen …?” or “Have you not considered …?” The Word of God was not issuing arbitrary commands from on high but was entering into a dialogue with the Quraysh. It reminds them, for example, that the Kabah, the House of al-Lah, accounted in large measure for their success, which was really in some sense owing to God. The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circumambulations around the shrine, but when they put themselves and their own material success into the center of their lives they had forgotten the meaning of these ancient rites of orientation. They should look at the “signs” (ayat) of God’s goodness and power in the natural world. If they failed to reproduce God’s benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with the true nature of things. Consequently, Muhammad made his converts bow down in ritual prayer (salat) twice a day. This external gesture would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and reorient their lives. Eventually Muhammad’s religion would be known as islam, the act of existential surrender that each convert was expected to make to al-Lah: a muslim was a man or woman who has surrendered his or her whole being to the Creator. The Quraysh were horrified when they saw these first Muslims making the salat: they found it unacceptable that a member of the haughty clan of Quraysh with centuries of proud Bedouin independence behind him should be prepared to grovel on the ground like a slave, and the Muslims had to retire to the glens around the city to make their prayer in secret. The reaction of the Quraysh showed that Muhammad had diagnosed their spirit with unerring accuracy.

实际上，伊斯兰教义意味着穆斯林有责任创建一个公正平等的社会，让穷人和弱势群体得到体面的对待。《古兰经》早期的道德教诲很简单：囤积财物是错误的。积累财富并建立私人财富固然重要，但将个人财富的一定比例定期捐赠给穷人，公平地分享社会财富，才是美德。14^施舍（天课）与礼拜（萨拉特）是伊斯兰教五大支柱（鲁克纳）或修行方式中的两项。如同希伯来先知一样，穆罕默德宣扬的伦理观，由于他对独一真主的崇拜，我们或许可以称之为社会主义。伊斯兰教没有关于上帝的强制性教义：事实上，《古兰经》对神学推测持高度怀疑态度，将其斥为“扎纳”（zanna），即对无人能够知晓或证明之事的自欺欺人的猜测。基督教的道成肉身和三位一体教义似乎是“扎纳”的典型例子，因此，穆斯林认为这些观念亵渎神明也就不足为奇了。相反，如同犹太教一样，上帝被视为一种道德准则。由于几乎没有接触过犹太教徒或基督教徒及其经文，穆罕默德直接触及了历史上的单一神论的本质。

In practical terms, islam meant that Muslims had a duty to create a just, equitable society where the poor and vulnerable are treated decently. The early moral message of the Koran is simple: it is wrong to stockpile wealth and to build a private fortune, and good to share the wealth of society fairly by giving a regular proportion of one’s wealth to the poor.¹⁴ Alms-giving (zakat) accompanied by prayer (salat) represented two of the five essential “pillars” (rukn) or practices of Islam. Like the Hebrew prophets, Muhammad preached an ethic that we might call socialist as a consequence of his worship of the one God. There were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of theological speculation, dismissing it as zanna, self-indulgent guesswork about things that nobody can possibly know or prove. The Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity seemed prime examples of zanna and, not surprisingly, the Muslims found these notions blasphemous. Instead, as in Judaism, God was experienced as a moral imperative. Having practically no contact with either Jews or Christians and their scriptures, Muhammad had cut straight into the essence of historical monotheism.

然而，在《古兰经》中，真主安拉（al-Lah）比耶和华（YHWH）更不具人格化。他缺乏圣经中上帝的悲悯和激情。我们只能在自然界的“迹象”中瞥见上帝的某些面貌，而他又是如此超凡脱俗，以至于我们只能用“比喻”来谈论他。因此，《古兰经》^不断敦促穆斯林将世界视为一种启示；他们必须努力运用想象力，透过支离破碎的世界，看到原始存在的全部力量，看到贯穿万物的超越现实。穆斯林应当培养一种圣礼式或象征性的态度：

In the Koran, however, al-Lah is more impersonal than YHWH. He lacks the pathos and passion of the biblical God. We can only glimpse something of God in the “signs” of nature, and so transcendent is he that we can only talk about him in “parables.”¹⁵ Constantly, therefore, the Koran urges Muslims to see the world as an epiphany; they must make the imaginative effort to see through the fragmentary world to the full power of original being, to the transcendent reality that infuses all things. Muslims were to cultivate a sacramental or symbolic attitude:

《古兰经》不断强调运用智慧解读真主的“迹象”或“启示”的重要性。穆斯林不应放弃理性，而应以专注和好奇的目光观察世界。正是这种态度，使得穆斯林后来建立起卓越的自然科学传统，而自然科学从未像在基督教中那样被视为对宗教的威胁。对自然界运行规律的研究表明，自然界具有超越性的维度和源头，我们只能通过迹象来谈论它。以及象征意义：即使是先知的故事、末日审判的记载和天堂的欢乐，也不应该按字面意思解释，而应该作为更高层次、不可言喻的现实的寓言。

The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the “signs” or “messages” of God. Muslims are not to abdicate their reason but to look at the world attentively and with curiosity. It was this attitude that later enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science, which has never been seen as such a danger to religion as in Christianity. A study of the workings of the natural world showed that it had a transcendent dimension and source, whom we can talk about only in signs and symbols: even the stories of the prophets, the accounts of the Last Judgment and the joys of paradise should not be interpreted literally but as parables of a higher, ineffable reality.

但最伟大的标志莫过于《古兰经》本身：事实上，它的每一节经文都被称为“阿亚特”（ayat）。西方人觉得《古兰经》晦涩难懂，这很大程度上是翻译的问题。阿拉伯语尤其难以翻译：例如，即使是普通的文学作品和政客的日常言论，翻译成英语后也常常显得生硬晦涩，而《古兰经》更是如此，因为它是用密集、隐晦、省略的语言写成的。尤其是早期的几章经文，给人一种感觉，仿佛人类的语言在神圣的冲击下被碾碎、撕裂。穆斯林常常说，当他们阅读《古兰经》的译本时，感觉就像在读另一本书，因为译本完全没有传达出阿拉伯语的美妙之处。正如其名，《古兰经》是用来朗诵的，语言的韵律是其魅力的重要组成部分。穆斯林说，当他们在清真寺聆听《古兰经》诵读时，会感到自己被神圣的声音所环绕，就像穆罕默德在希拉山上被天使加百列拥抱，或者无论他看向何方都能看到地平线上的天使一样。这并非一本仅仅为了获取信息而阅读的书籍。它的目的是让人感受到神圣，因此不应匆匆阅读。

But the greatest sign of all was the Koran itself: indeed its individual verses are called ayat. Western people find the Koran a difficult book, and this is largely a problem of translation. Arabic is particularly difficult to translate: even ordinary literature and the mundane utterances of politicians frequently sound stilted and alien when translated into English, for example, and this is doubly true of the Koran, which is written in dense and highly allusive, elliptical speech. The early suras in particular give the impression of human language crushed and splintered under the divine impact. Muslims often say that when they read the Koran in a translation, they feel that they are reading a different book because nothing of the beauty of the Arabic has been conveyed. As its name suggests, it is meant to be recited aloud, and the sound of the language is an essential part of its effect. Muslims say that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound, rather as Muhammad was enveloped in the embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira or when he saw the angel on the horizon no matter where he looked. It is not a book to be read simply to acquire information. It is meant to yield a sense of the divine, and must not be read in haste:

穆斯林声称，通过正确的方式研读《古兰经》，他们能够体验到一种超越感，一种存在于世俗世界短暂现象背后的终极实在和力量。因此，阅读《古兰经》是一种精神修行，基督徒可能难以理解，因为他们没有像希伯来语、梵语和阿拉伯语那样神圣的语言，而希伯来语、梵语和阿拉伯语对犹太教徒、印度教徒和穆斯林而言都是神圣的。耶稣是上帝的圣言，而新约希腊文本身并无神圣之处。然而，犹太人却拥有……他们对《托拉》也抱有类似的态度。当他们研读圣经的前五卷书时，并非只是匆匆浏览。他们常常大声背诵经文，细细品味据说是上帝在西奈山上向摩西显现时所使用的话语。有时，他们会随着经文的节奏前后摇摆，如同火焰在圣灵的吹拂下燃烧。显然，以这种方式阅读圣经的犹太人，与那些觉得摩西五经大部分内容枯燥乏味、晦涩难懂的基督徒相比，所体验到的圣经截然不同。

By approaching the Koran in the right way, Muslims claim that they do experience a sense of transcendence, of an ultimate reality and power that lie behind the transient and fleeting phenomena of the mundane world. Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way that Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic are sacred to Jews, Hindus and Muslims. It is Jesus who is the Word of God, and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar attitude toward the Torah. When they study the first five books of the Bible, they do not simply run their eyes over the page. Frequently they recite the words aloud, savoring the words that God himself is supposed to have used when he revealed himself to Moses on Sinai. Sometimes they sway backward and forward, like a flame before the breath of the Spirit. Obviously Jews who read their Bible in this way are experiencing a very different book than Christians who find most of the Pentateuch extremely dull and obscure.

穆罕默德的早期传记作者不断描述阿拉伯人第一次听到《古兰经》时的惊奇和震撼。许多人当场皈依，认为只有真主才能解释这门语言的非凡之美。皈依者常常将这种体验描述为神圣的入侵，唤醒了他们内心深处的渴望，释放出汹涌澎湃的情感。年轻的古莱什人欧麦尔·伊本·哈塔卜曾是穆罕默德的激烈反对者；他笃信古老的异教，甚至准备刺杀先知。然而，这位穆斯林中的“塔尔苏斯的扫罗”并非因耶稣显灵而皈依，而是因《古兰经》而皈依。关于他的皈依故事有两个版本，都值得关注。第一个版本是欧麦尔发现他秘密皈依伊斯兰教的妹妹法蒂玛正在聆听一段新的经文诵读。“那是什么胡言乱语？”他怒吼着冲进屋里，把可怜的法蒂玛撞倒在地。但当他看到她流血时，他可能感到羞愧，因为他的脸色变了。他捡起那份手稿——那是来访的古兰经诵读者在混乱中掉落的——作为少数几个识字的古莱什人之一，他开始阅读。欧麦尔是公认的阿拉伯口头诗歌权威，诗人会向他请教语言的确切含义，但他从未接触过像古兰经这样的作品。“这番话语多么优美高尚啊！”他惊叹道，并立刻皈依了真主的宗教。 ¹⁸文字的美穿透了他积压的仇恨和偏见，触及了他内心深处他从未意识到的接受力。我们都曾有过类似的经历，当一首诗触动了我们内心深处超越理性的共鸣时。在另一个版本的欧麦尔对话中，一天晚上，他在克尔白遇到了穆罕默德，穆罕默德正在圣陵前独自默念古兰经。欧麦尔心想自己或许会想听听先知的话，于是他悄悄地钻过覆盖着巨大花岗岩立方体的锦缎布幔，绕到先知面前，径直走到他面前。正如先知所说：“我们之间只有克尔白的遮蔽物”，他所有的防线都已卸下，只剩最后一道防线。然后，奇迹发生了。阿拉伯语发挥了作用：“当我听到《古兰经》时，我的心被软化了，我哭了，伊斯兰教进入了我的生命。” ¹⁹正是《古兰经》使上帝不再是“外在的”强大存在，而是将他带入了每个信徒的思想、心灵和生命中。

The early biographers of Muhammad constantly describe the wonder and shock felt by the Arabs when they heard the Koran for the first time. Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the extraordinary beauty of the language. Frequently a convert would describe the experience as a divine invasion that tapped buried yearnings and released a flood of feelings. Thus the young Qurayshi Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready to assassinate the Prophet. But this Muslim Saul of Tarsus was converted not by a vision of Jesus the Word but by the Koran. There are two versions of his conversion story, both worthy of note. The first has Umar discovering his sister, who had secretly become a Muslim, listening to a recitation of a new sura. “What was that balderdash?” he had roared angrily as he strode into the house, knocking poor Fatimah to the ground. But when he saw that she was bleeding, he probably felt ashamed because his face changed. He picked up the manuscript, which the visiting Koran reciter had dropped in the commotion, and, being one of the few Qurayshis who were literate, he started to read. Umar was an acknowledged authority on Arabic oral poetry and was consulted by poets as to the precise significance of the language, but he had never come across anything like the Koran. “How fine and noble is this speech!” he said wonderingly, and was instantly converted to the new religion of al-Lah.¹⁸ The beauty of the words had reached through his reserves of hatred and prejudice to a core of receptivity that he had not been conscious of. We have all had a similar experience, when a poem touches a chord of recognition that lies at a level deeper than the rational. In the other version of Umar’s conversation, he encountered Muhammad one night at the Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before the shrine. Thinking that he would like to listen to the words, Umar crept under the damask cloth that covered the huge granite cube and edged his way around until he was standing directly in front of the Prophet. As he said, “There was nothing between us but the cover of the Kabah”—all his defenses but one were down. Then the magic of the Arabic did its work: “When I heard the Koran, my heart was softened and I wept and Islam entered into me.”¹⁹ It was the Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality “out there” and brought him into the mind, heart and being of each believer.

欧麦尔和其他因《古兰经》而皈依伊斯兰教的穆斯林的经历，或许可以与乔治·斯坦纳在其著作《真实的存在：我们所说的话里有什么？》中描述的艺术体验相提并论。他谈到他所谓的“严肃艺术、文学和音乐的不谨慎”，这种不谨慎“质疑我们存在的最后私密^之处”。它是一种入侵或宣告，闯入“我们谨慎存在的小屋”，命令我们“改变你的生活！”在这样的召唤之后，小屋“不再像以前那样适宜居住”。像欧麦尔这样的穆斯林似乎都经历了类似的感官不安，一种觉醒和令人不安的意义感，使他们能够痛苦地与传统决裂。即使是那些拒绝接受伊斯兰教的古莱什人，也因《古兰经》而感到不安，并发现它超越了他们所有熟悉的范畴：它与卡欣或诗人的灵感截然不同；它并非巫师的咒语。一些故事记载，强大的古莱什人，那些坚定不移地与反对派对抗的人，在聆听古兰经章节后，也明显动摇了。仿佛穆罕默德创造了一种全新的文学形式，有些人对此难以接受，而另一些人则为之振奋。如果没有古兰经的这段经历，伊斯兰教极不可能扎根。我们看到，古代以色列人用了大约700年的时间才摆脱旧有的宗教信仰，接受一神论，而穆罕默德却在短短23年内就帮助阿拉伯人完成了这一艰难的转变。穆罕默德作为诗人与先知，以及古兰经作为文本与神显，无疑是艺术与宗教之间深刻契合的一个非凡例证。

The experience of Umar and the other Muslims who were converted by the Koran can perhaps be compared to the experience of art described by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? He speaks of what he calls “the indiscretion of serious art, literature and music” which “queries the last privacies of our existence.” It is an invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into “the small house of our cautionary being” and commands us “change your life!” After such a summons, the house “is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.”²⁰ Muslims like Umar seem to have experienced a similar unsettling of sensibility, an awakening and a disturbing sense of significance which enabled them to make the painful break with the traditional past. Even those Qurayshis who refused to accept Islam were disturbed by the Koran and found that it lay outside all their familiar categories: it was nothing like the inspiration of the kahin or the poet; nor was it like the incantations of a magician. Some stories show powerful Qurayshis who remained steadfastly with the opposition being visibly shaken when they listened to a sura. It is as though Muhammad had created an entirely new literary form that some people were not ready for but which thrilled others. Without this experience of the Koran, it is extremely unlikely that Islam would have taken root. We have seen that it took the ancient Israelites some 700 years to break with their old religious allegiances and accept monotheism, but Muhammad managed to help the Arabs achieve this difficult transition in a mere 23 years. Muhammad as poet and prophet and the Koran as text and theophany are surely an unusually striking instance of the deep congruence that exists between art and religion.

在传教的最初几年，穆罕默德吸引了许多年轻一代的皈依者，他们对麦加的资本主义风气感到失望；此外，他还吸引了许多来自弱势群体和边缘群体的信徒，其中包括妇女、奴隶和弱小部族的成员。早期史料记载，一度似乎整个麦加都愿意接受穆罕默德改革后的真主宗教。那些对现状十分满意的富裕阶层自然保持着疏离的态度，但直到穆罕默德禁止穆斯林崇拜异教神灵，他才与古莱什派的统治者正式决裂。在传教的最初三年里，穆罕默德似乎并没有强调他所传教内容的独一真神论内涵。人们或许以为，他们可以像以往一样，继续崇拜阿拉伯的传统神祇，以及至高无上的真主安拉。但当他谴责这些古老的崇拜是偶像崇拜时，他一夜之间失去了大部分信徒，伊斯兰教也沦为受人鄙视和迫害的少数派。我们已经看到，信仰一神论需要经历痛苦的​​意识转变。如同早期基督徒一样，第一批穆斯林也被指责为“无神论者”，这在当时的社会中构成了严重的威胁。在麦加，城市文明是如此新颖，对于自给自足的古莱什人来说，这无疑是一项脆弱的成就。许多人似乎都感受到了与那些叫嚣着要处死基督徒的罗马公民同样的恐惧和沮丧。古莱什人似乎认为与祖先神祇决裂是极其危险的，而不久之后，穆罕默德的生命也岌岌可危。西方学者通常将阿拉伯人与古莱什人的决裂追溯到可能为伪经的《撒旦诗篇》事件，该事件因萨尔曼·鲁西迪事件而臭名昭著。希贾兹地区的阿拉伯人尤其敬仰三位阿拉伯神祇：拉特（其名字意为“女神”）和乌扎（意为“至高者”），她们分别在麦加东南部的塔伊夫和纳赫拉设有神龛；以及玛纳特（意为“命运者”），她的神龛位于红海沿岸的库代德。这些神祇不像朱诺或帕拉斯·雅典娜那样具有完全的人格化特征。她们常被称为“巴纳特·拉赫”（意为“神的女儿们”），但这并不一定意味着她们构成了一个完整的神系。阿拉伯人使用这类亲属称谓来指代一种抽象的关系：例如，“命运之女”（banat al-dahr ，字面意思是“命运的女儿”）仅仅指不幸或变迁。“神灵” （banat al-Lah）一词可能仅仅指“神灵”。这些神灵在他们的圣地中并非以写实的雕像来代表，而是以巨大的立石来象征，类似于古代迦南人使用的立石。阿拉伯人并非以粗俗简陋的方式崇拜这些立石，而是将其视为神圣的象征。如同麦加的克尔白一样，塔伊夫、纳赫拉和库代德的圣地也成为了阿拉伯人情感世界中重要的精神地标。他们的祖先自古以来就在那里敬拜，这赋予了他们一种疗愈的延续感。

During the first years of his mission, Muhammad attracted many converts from the younger generation, who were becoming disillusioned with the capitalistic ethos of Mecca, as well as from underprivileged and marginalized groups, which included women, slaves and members of the weaker clans. At one point, the early sources tell us, it seemed as though the whole of Mecca would accept Muhammad’s reformed religion of al-Lah. The richer establishment, who were more than happy with the status quo, understandably held aloof, but there was no formal rupture with the leading Qurayshis until Muhammad forbade the Muslims to worship the pagan gods. For the first three years of his mission it seems that Muhammad did not emphasize the monotheistic content of his message, and people probably imagined that they could go on worshipping the traditional deities of Arabia alongside al-Lah, the High God, as they always had. But when he condemned these ancient cults as idolatrous, he lost most of his followers overnight and Islam became a despised and persecuted minority. We have seen that the belief in only one God demands a painful change of consciousness. Like the early Christians, the first Muslims were accused of an “atheism” which was deeply threatening to society. In Mecca, where urban civilization was so novel and must have seemed a fragile achievement for all the proud self-sufficiency of the Quraysh, many seem to have felt the same sinking dread and dismay as those citizens of Rome who had clamored for Christian blood. The Quraysh seem to have found a rupture with the ancestral gods profoundly threatening, and it would not be long before Muhammad’s own life was imperiled. Western scholars have usually dated this rupture with the Quraysh to the possibly apocryphal incident of the Satanic Verses, which has become notorious since the tragic Salman Rushdie affair. Three of the Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant “the Goddess”) and al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the southeast of Mecca, and Manat, the Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast. These deities were not fully personalized like Juno or Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fully developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, “daughters of fate”) simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified “divine beings.” These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs. Their forefathers had worshipped there from time immemorial, and this gave a healing sense of continuity.

《撒旦诗篇》的故事在《古兰经》或任何早期的口头或书面文献中都没有提及。它没有被收录在伊本·伊斯哈格的《先知传记》（Sira）中——这部最权威的先知传记——而只出现在十世纪历史学家阿布·贾法尔·塔巴里（卒于公元923年）的著作中。他告诉我们，穆罕默德禁止了撒旦崇拜之后，与他部落中的大多数人之间出现了裂痕，这令他感到苦恼。因此，受“撒旦”的启发，他念诵了一些离经叛道的经文，允许人们像天使一样尊崇真主的三位女神，视她们为代求者。在这些所谓的“撒旦式”经文中，这三位女神并非与真主平起平坐，而是地位较低的灵体，可以代表人类向真主求情。然而，塔巴里后来记载，加百列告诉先知，这些经文源于“撒旦”，应该从《古兰经》中删除，并用以下经文取而代之，这些经文宣称真主的三位女神不过是想象的产物和虚构：

The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned either in the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources. It is not included in Ibn Ishaq’s Sira, the most authoritative biography of the Prophet, but only in the work of the tenth-century historian Abu Jafar at-Tabari (d. 923). He tells us that Muhammad was distressed by the rift that had developed between him and most of his tribe after he had forbidden the cult of the goddesses and so, inspired by “Satan,” he uttered some rogue verses which allowed the banat al-Lah to be venerated as intercessors, like the angels. In these so-called “Satanic” verses, the three goddesses were not on a par with al-Lah but were lesser spiritual beings who could intercede with him on behalf of mankind. Later, however, Tabari says that Gabriel told the Prophet that these verses were of “Satanic” origin and should be excised from the Koran to be replaced by these lines which declared that the banat al-Lah were mere projections and figments of the imagination:

这是《古兰经》中对祖先异教神祇最严厉的谴责，这些经文被纳入《古兰经》后，与古莱什人和解的希望彻底破灭。自此，穆罕默德成为一位充满嫉妒心的一神论者，而以物配主（即偶像崇拜，字面意思是将其他存在与真主相提并论）也成为伊斯兰教最大的罪过。

This was the most radical of all the Koranic condemnations of the ancestral pagan gods, and after these verses had been included in the Koran there was no chance of a reconciliation with the Quraysh. From this point, Muhammad became a jealous monotheist, and shirk (idolatry; literally, associating other beings with al-Lah) became the greatest sin of Islam.

穆罕默德在“撒旦诗篇”事件中并未向多神教做出任何让步——如果此事确有其事的话。认为“撒旦”的角色意味着《古兰经》曾一度被邪恶玷污也是错误的：在伊斯兰教中，撒旦的形象远比在基督教中更容易驾驭。《古兰经》告诉我们，在末日审判时，撒旦将被宽恕；阿拉伯人也经常使用“沙伊坦”（Shaitan）一词来指代纯粹的人性诱惑者或自然的诱惑。 ²²此事或许表明，穆罕默德在试图用人类语言传达那不可言喻的神圣启示时，确实遇到了困难：它与一些经典的《古兰经》经文相关，这些经文暗示，其他大多数先知在传达神圣启示时也曾犯过类似的“撒旦式”错误，但上帝总是会纠正他们的错误，并降下新的、更高级的启示来代替。另一种更为世俗的视角是，将穆罕默德视为像其他任何一位艺术家一样，根据新的见解修改自己的作品。史料表明，穆罕默德坚决拒绝与古莱什人妥协。这是关于偶像崇拜的问题。他为人务实，乐于在他认为无关紧要的事情上做出让步，但每当古莱什人要求他采取一神崇拜的方案，允许他们崇拜祖先的神灵，而他和他的穆斯林只崇拜真主安拉时，穆罕默德都断然拒绝。正如《古兰经》所言：“我不崇拜你们所崇拜的，你们也不崇拜我所崇拜的……你们有你们的律法，我有我的律法！” ²³穆斯林只归顺真主，绝不屈服于古莱什人所信奉的虚假崇拜对象——无论是神灵还是价值观。

Muhammad had not made any concession to polytheism in the incident of the Satanic Verses—if, that is, it ever happened. It is also incorrect to imagine that the role of “Satan” meant that the Koran was momentarily tainted by evil: in Islam Satan is a much more manageable character than he became in Christianity. The Koran tells us that he will be forgiven on the Last Day, and Arabs frequently used the word “Shaitan” to allude to a purely human tempter or a natural temptation.²² The incident may indicate the difficulty Muhammad certainly experienced when he tried to incarnate the ineffable divine message in human speech: it is associated with canonical Koranic verses which suggest that most of the other prophets had made similar “Satanic” slips when they conveyed the divine message but that God always rectified their mistakes and sent down a new and superior revelation in their stead. An alternative and more secular way of looking at this is to see Muhammad revising his work in the light of new insights like any other creative artist. The sources show that Muhammad absolutely refused to compromise with the Quraysh on the matter of idolatry. He was a pragmatic man and would readily make a concession on what he deemed to be inessential, but whenever the Quraysh asked him to adopt a monolatrous solution, allowing them to worship their ancestral gods while he and his Muslims worshipped al-Lah alone, Muhammad vehemently rejected the proposal. As the Koran has it: “I do not worship that which you worship, and neither do you worship that which I worship … Unto you your moral law, and, unto me, mine!”²³ The Muslims would surrender to God alone and would not succumb to the false objects of worship—be they deities or values—espoused by the Quraysh.

对真主独一性的认知是《古兰经》道德的基础。效忠物质财富或信赖低等神灵都被视为“以物配主”（ shirk），这是伊斯兰教最大的罪过。《古兰经》对异教神灵的批判几乎与犹太教经典如出一辙：它们完全无能。这些神灵无法提供食物或生活所需；将它们置于生活的中心毫无意义，因为它们无能为力。相反，穆斯林必须认识到，真主（安拉）才是至高无上、独一无二的存在。

The perception of God’s uniqueness was the basis of the morality of the Koran. To give allegiance to material goods or to put trust in lesser beings was shirk (idolatry), the greatest sin of Islam. The Koran pours scorn on the pagan deities in almost exactly the same way as the Jewish scriptures: they are totally ineffective. These gods cannot give food or sustenance; it is no good putting them at the center of one’s life because they are powerless. Instead the Muslim must realize that al-Lah is the ultimate and unique reality:

像亚他那修这样的基督徒也坚持认为，只有造物主，即万物之源，才拥有救赎的力量。他们以三位一体和道成肉身的教义表达了这一洞见。《古兰经》回归了闪米特人关于神圣统一的观念，拒绝想象上帝可以“生”子。除了创造天地万物的真主安拉之外，别无他神，唯有祂才能拯救人类，并赐予人类所需的精神和物质滋养。只有承认祂是“无因之源” （as-Samad），即“万物存在的无因”，穆斯林才能触及超越时间和历史的现实维度，从而超越撕裂他们社会的部落分裂。穆罕默德深知一神论与部落主义格格不入：一个作为所有崇拜中心的单一神祇，能够整合社会和个人。

Christians like Athanasius had also insisted that only the Creator, the Source of Being, had the power to redeem. They had expressed this insight in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Koran returns to a Semitic idea of the divine unity and refuses to imagine that God can “beget” a son. There is no deity but al-Lah the Creator of heaven and earth, who alone can save man and send him the spiritual and physical sustenance that he needs. Only by acknowledging him as as-Samad, “the Uncaused Cause of all being,” would Muslims address a dimension of reality beyond time and history and which would take them beyond the tribal divisions that were tearing their society apart. Muhammad knew that monotheism was inimical to tribalism: a single deity who was the focus of all worship would integrate society as well as the individual.

然而，关于上帝并不存在简单的概念。这位唯一的真神并非像我们一样可以认知和理解的存在。“真主至大！”（Allahu Akhbah!）这句召唤穆斯林礼拜的口号，既区分了上帝与现实世界的其他部分，也区分了上帝作为……他存在于自身（al-Dhat）之中，存在于我们所能谈论的一切之中。然而，这位深不可测、不可接近的神却渴望被世人所知。一段早期圣训（hadith）记载，神对穆罕默德说：“我曾是隐藏的宝藏；我渴望被世人所知。因此，我创造了世界，以便世人能够认识我。” ²⁵通过思考自然界的迹象（ayat）和《古兰经》的经文，穆斯林得以瞥见神性面向世人的一面，《古兰经》称之为真主的面容（wajh al-Lah）。如同其他两个古老的宗教一样，伊斯兰教明确指出，我们只能通过神的作为来认识他，这些作为使他那不可言喻的存在适应我们有限的理解。《古兰经》敦促穆斯林培养对环绕着他们的真主面容或自我的永恒觉知（taqwa）：“无论你转向何方，都有真主的面容。” ²⁶与基督教教父们一样，《古兰经》视上帝为绝对者，唯有祂拥有真正的存在：“凡生活在地上或天上的，都必将消逝；唯有你的养育者，祂的本体，永恒存在，充满威严和荣耀。” ²⁷《古兰经》中，上帝被赋予了九十九个尊名或属性。这些尊名强调祂是“至高无上的”，是宇宙中一切积极品质的源泉。因此，世界之所以存在，是因为祂是至高无上的（ al-Ghani，意为丰富和无限）；祂是生命的赋予者（al-Muhyi），是全知全能者（al-Alim），是言语的创造者（al-Kalimah）：因此，没有祂，就没有生命、知识和言语。这断言唯有上帝拥有真正的存在和积极的价值。然而，这些神圣的尊名似乎常常相互矛盾。因此，真主是“至尊者”（al-Qahtar），祂主宰一切，击溃敌人；祂是“至仁者”（al-Halim） ，祂宽容至慈；祂是“夺取者”（al -Qabid），祂慷慨赐予；祂是“降卑者” （al-Khafid） ，祂使之卑微；祂是“提升者” （ar-Rafic），祂使之尊贵。真主的尊名在穆斯林的虔诚信仰中扮演着核心角色：人们诵念这些尊名，用念珠计数，并将它们吟诵成咒语。这一切都在提醒穆斯林，他们所敬拜的真主无法被人类的范畴所定义，也拒绝任何简单的定义。

There is no simplistic notion of God, however. This single deity is not a being like ourselves whom we can know and understand. The phrase “Allahu Akhbah!” (God is greater!) that summons Muslims to salat distinguishes between God and the rest of reality, as well as between God as he is in himself (al-Dhat) and anything that we can say about him. Yet this incomprehensible and inaccessible God had wanted to make himself known. An early tradition (hadith) has God say to Muhammad: “I was a hidden treasure; I wanted to be known. Hence, I created the world so that I might be known.”²⁵ By contemplating the signs (ayat) of nature and the verses of the Koran, Muslims could glimpse that aspect of divinity which has turned toward the world, which the Koran calls the Face of God (wajh al-Lah). Like the two older religions, Islam makes it clear that we only see God in his activities, which adapt his ineffable being to our limited understanding. The Koran urges Muslims to cultivate a perpetual consciousness (taqwa) of the Face or the Self of God that surrounds them on all sides: “Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of al-Lah.”²⁶ Like the Christian Fathers, the Koran sees God as the Absolute, who alone has true existence: “All that lives on earth or in the heavens is bound to pass away: but forever will abide thy Sustainer’s Self, full of majesty and glory.”²⁷ In the Koran, God is given ninety-nine names or attributes. These emphasize that he is “greater,” the source of all positive qualities that we find in the universe. Thus the world only exists because he is al-Ghani (rich and infinite); he is the giver of life (al-Muhyi), the knower of all things (al-Alim), the producer of speech (al-Kalimah): without him, therefore, there would not be life, knowledge or speech. It is an assertion that only God has true existence and positive value. Yet frequently the divine names seem to cancel one another out. Thus God is al-Qahtar, he who dominates and who breaks the back of his enemies, and al-Halim, the utterly forbearing one; he is al-Qabid, he who takes away, and al-Basit, he who gives abundantly; al-Khafid, he who brings low, and ar-Rafic, he who exalts. The Names of God play a central role in Muslim piety: they are recited, counted on rosary beads and chanted as a mantra. All this has reminded Muslims that the God they worship cannot be contained by human categories and refuses simplistic definition.

伊斯兰教的“五大支柱”之首便是“沙哈达”（清真言），即穆斯林的信仰宣言：“我作证，除真主外，别无应受崇拜的；穆罕默德是真主的使者。”这不仅是对真主存在的肯定，更是对真主是唯一真实存在、唯一真实存在形式的承认。祂是唯一真实存在、唯一美、唯一完美的化身：所有看似存在并拥有这些特质的事物，都只是在与真主这一本质存在相联系的范围内才拥有这些特质。要做出这样的断言，穆斯林必须将真主融入他们的生活，视真主为中心，并将其视为唯一的优先事项。对真主独一性的断言，并非简单地否定真主等其他神灵的存在。敬拜。说真主是独一的，并非仅仅是一个数字定义：它呼吁人们将这种独一性作为个人生活和社会的驱动力。真主的独一性可以在真正完整的自我中得以窥见。但神圣的独一性也要求穆斯林承认其他宗教的追求。因为只有一位真主，所有正统的宗教都必须源自于他。对至高无上的唯一实在的信仰会受到文化的影响，并由不同的社会以不同的方式表达，但所有真正敬拜的焦点都必须受到阿拉伯人一直称之为“安拉”（al-Lah）的存在所启发和指向。古兰经的神圣名称之一是“努尔”（an-Nur），意为“光明”。在这些著名的古兰经经文中，真主是所有知识的源泉，也是人类得以窥见超越的途径：

The first of the “pillars” of Islam would be the Shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith: “I bear witness that there is no god but al-Lah and that Muhammad is his Messenger.” This was not simply an affirmation of God’s existence but an acknowledgment that al-Lah was the only true reality, the only true form of existence. He was the only true reality, beauty or perfection: all the beings that seem to exist and possess these qualities have them only insofar as they participate in this essential being. To make this assertion demands that Muslims integrate their lives by making God their focus and sole priority. The assertion of the unity of God was not simply a denial that deities like the banat al-Lah were worthy of worship. To say that God was One was not a mere numerical definition: it was a call to make that unity the driving factor of one’s life and society. The unity of God could be glimpsed in the truly integrated self. But the divine unity also required Muslims to recognize the religious aspirations of others. Because there was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from him alone. Belief in the supreme and sole Reality would be culturally conditioned and would be expressed by different societies in different ways, but the focus of all true worship must have been inspired by and directed toward the being whom the Arabs had always called al-Lah. One of the divine names of the Koran is an-Nur, the Light. In these famous verses of the Koran, God is the source of all knowledge as well as the means whereby men catch a glimpse of transcendence:

动词“ ka”提醒我们，《古兰经》中关于真主的论述本质上是象征性的。因此，“光明”（ An-Nur）并非真主本身，而是指真主赐予特定启示（灯）的启迪，这启示照耀在个人的内心（壁龛）中。光明本身不能完全等同于任何一位持有者，而是所有持有者共有的。正如穆斯林注释家从早期就指出的那样，光明是超越时空的神圣实在的绝佳象征。这些经文中橄榄树的意象被解读为启示的连续性，它源于同一“根”，并衍生出丰富多彩的宗教体验，这些体验无法被任何特定的传统或地域所定义或限制：它既非东方，也非西方。

The participle ka is a reminder of the essentially symbolic nature of the Koranic discourse about God. An-Nur, the Light, is not God himself, therefore, but refers to the enlightenment which he bestows on a particular revelation (the lamp) which shines in the heart of an individual (the niche). The light itself cannot be identified wholly with any one of its bearers but is common to them all. As Muslim commentators pointed out from the very earliest days, light is a particularly good symbol for the divine Reality, which transcends time and space. The image of the olive tree in these verses has been interpreted as an allusion to the continuity of revelation, which springs from one “root” and branches into a multifarious variety of religious experience that cannot be identified with or confined by any one particular tradition or locality: it is neither of the East nor the West.

当基督徒瓦拉卡·伊本·瑙法尔承认穆罕默德是真先知时，他和穆罕默德都没有期望他皈依伊斯兰教。穆罕默德从未要求犹太人或基督徒皈依他的真主宗教，除非他们特别愿意这样做，因为他们已经获得了各自可靠的启示。《古兰经》并不认为启示会否定先前先知的讯息和见解。相反，它强调的是人类宗教体验的延续性。强调这一点至关重要，因为宽容并非当今许多西方人倾向于归于伊斯兰教的美德。然而，从一开始，穆斯林对启示的理解就比犹太教或基督教更为包容。如今许多人谴责伊斯兰教中的不宽容，并非总是源于对真主的不同理解，而是源于其他方面：穆斯林无法容忍不公正，无论这种不公正是由他们自己的统治者所为——例如伊朗的^沙阿·穆罕默德·礼萨·巴列维——还是由强大的西方国家所为。《古兰经》并不谴责其他宗教传统是错误的或不完整的，而是指出每一位新的先知都在印证和延续其前人的洞见。《古兰经》教导说，真主曾向地球上的每个民族派遣使者：伊斯兰传统认为，共有124,000位这样的先知，这个象征性的数字暗示着无限。因此，《古兰经》反复指出，它所传达的信息本质上并不是全新的，穆斯林必须强调他们与古老宗教的亲缘关系：

When the Christian Waraqa ibn Nawfal had acknowledged Muhammad as a true prophet, neither he nor Muhammad expected him to convert to Islam. Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to convert to his religion of al-Lah unless they particularly wished to do so, because they had received authentic revelations of their own. The Koran did not see revelation as canceling out the messages and insights of previous prophets, but instead it stressed the continuity of the religious experience of mankind. It is important to stress this point because tolerance is not a virtue that many Western people today would feel inclined to attribute to Islam. Yet from the start, Muslims saw revelation in less exclusive terms than either Jews or Christians. The intolerance that many people condemn in Islam today does not always spring from a rival vision of God but from quite another source:²⁹ Muslims are intolerant of injustice, whether this is committed by rulers of their own—like Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran—or by the powerful Western countries. The Koran does not condemn other religious traditions as false or incomplete but shows each new prophet as confirming and continuing the insights of his predecessors. The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with the older religions:

《古兰经》自然而然地特别提及了阿拉伯人熟知的使徒，例如亚伯拉罕、诺亚、摩西和耶稣，他们也是犹太教和基督教的先知。它还提到了胡德和萨利赫，他们曾被派往古代阿拉伯的米甸人和萨穆德人那里。如今，穆斯林坚持认为，如果穆罕默德了解印度教徒和佛教徒，他也会将他们的宗教圣贤纳入其中：在他去世后，他们在伊斯兰帝国中享有与犹太教徒和基督教徒一样的完全宗教自由。穆斯林认为，基于同样的原则，《古兰经》也应该尊崇美洲印第安人或澳大利亚土著的萨满和圣人。

The Koran naturally singles out apostles who were familiar to the Arabs—like Abraham, Noah, Moses and Jesus, who were the prophets of the Jews and Christians. It also mentions Hud and Salih, who had been sent to the ancient Arab peoples of Midian and Thamood. Today Muslims insist that if Muhammad had known about Hindus and Buddhists, he would have included their religious sages: after his death they were allowed full religious liberty in the Islamic empire, like the Jews and Christians. On the same principle, Muslims argue, the Koran would also have honored the shamans and holy men of the American Indians or the Australian aborigines.

穆罕默德对宗教体验延续性的信念很快就受到了考验。与古莱什人决裂后，麦加的穆斯林生活变得举步维艰。那些没有部落庇护的奴隶和自由民遭受了残酷的迫害，有些人甚至因此丧命。穆罕默德自己的哈希姆家族也遭到抵制，企图通过饥饿迫使他们屈服：这种匮乏很可能导致了……他挚爱的妻子赫蒂彻去世，这令穆罕默德悲痛欲绝。最终，他自己的生命也岌岌可危。北部定居点叶斯里卜的阿拉伯异教徒邀请穆斯林放弃他们的部落，迁居至此。这对于阿拉伯人来说是前所未有的举动：部落一直是阿拉伯的神圣价值，这样的背叛违背了根本原则。叶斯里卜各部落之间似乎无法弥合的战争，许多异教徒准备接受伊斯兰教，将其视为解决绿洲问题的精神和政治方案。定居点中有三个大型犹太部落，他们已经使异教徒接受了一神论。这意味着，他们不像古莱什人那样对阿拉伯神祇的贬损感到愤慨。因此，在公元622年夏天，大约七十名穆斯林及其家人启程前往叶斯里卜。

Muhammad’s belief in the continuity of the religious experience was soon put to the test. After the rift with the Quraysh, life became impossible for the Muslims in Mecca. The slaves and freedmen who had no tribal protection were persecuted so severely that some died under the treatment, and Muhammad’s own clan of Hashim were boycotted in an attempt to starve them into submission: the privation probably caused the death of his beloved wife, Khadija. Eventually Muhammad’s own life would be in danger. The pagan Arabs of the northern settlement of Yathrib had invited the Muslims to abandon their clan and to emigrate there. This was an absolutely unprecedented step for an Arab: the tribe had been the sacred value of Arabia and such a defection violated essential principles. Yathrib had been torn by apparently incurable warfare between its various tribal groups, and many of the pagans were ready to accept Islam as a spiritual and political solution to the problems of the oasis. There were three large Jewish tribes in the settlement, and they had prepared the minds of the pagans for monotheism. This meant that they were not as offended as the Quraysh by the denigration of the Arabian deities. Accordingly during the summer of 622, about seventy Muslims and their families set off for Yathrib.

在迁徙到叶斯里卜（即麦地那，穆斯林称之为“城”）的前一年，穆罕默德调整了自己的宗教，使其更接近他所理解的犹太教。多年来与世隔绝的生活，让他渴望与一个历史悠久、根基稳固的传统群体共同生活。因此，他规定穆斯林在犹太赎罪日斋戒，并命令穆斯林像犹太人一样每天祈祷三次，而不是像以前那样每天两次。穆斯林可以娶犹太女子为妻，并且应该遵守一些饮食律法。最重要的是，穆斯林现在必须像犹太人和基督徒一样面向耶路撒冷祈祷。麦地那的犹太人起初愿意给穆罕默德一个机会：绿洲的生活已经变得难以忍受，而且像麦地那许多虔诚的异教徒一样，他们愿意给他一个机会，尤其因为他似乎对他们的信仰抱有积极的态度。然而，最终他们还是背弃了穆罕默德，加入了那些敌视来自麦加的新来者的异教徒的行列。犹太人拒绝接受穆罕默德有其合理的宗教理由：他们认为预言的时代已经结束。他们期待弥赛亚的到来，但当时的犹太人和基督徒都不会相信他们是先知。然而，他们的动机也包含政治考量：过去，他们通过与交战的阿拉伯部落结盟，在绿洲地区获得了权力。然而，穆罕默德将这两个部落与古莱什部落联合起来，组成了新的穆斯林社群（乌玛），这是一个类似超级部落的组织，犹太人也是其中的一员。随着他们在麦地那的地位下降，犹太人变得敌对起来。他们经常聚集在清真寺里，“听穆斯林讲述他们的故事，并嘲笑他们的宗教。” ³¹凭借着对经文的精深了解，他们很容易就能找出穆罕默德故事中的漏洞。《古兰经》——其中一些内容与《圣经》版本有显著差异。他们还嘲笑穆罕默德的自负，说一个自称先知的人，连自己的骆驼走失了都找不到，这实在令人匪夷所思。

In the year before the hijra or migration to Yathrib (or Medina, the City, as the Muslims would call it), Muhammad had adapted his religion to bring it closer to Judaism as he understood it. After so many years of working in isolation he must have been looking forward to living with members of an older, more established tradition. Thus he prescribed a fast for Muslims on the Jewish Day of Atonement and commanded Muslims to pray three times a day like the Jews, instead of only twice as hitherto. Muslims could marry Jewish women and should observe some of the dietary laws. Above all, Muslims must now pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews and Christians. The Jews of Medina were at first prepared to give Muhammad a chance: life had become intolerable in the oasis, and like many of the committed pagans of Medina they were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he seemed so positively inclined toward their faith. Eventually, however, they turned against Muhammad and joined those pagans who were hostile to the newcomers from Mecca. The Jews had sound religious reasons for their rejection: they believed that the era of prophecy was over. They were expecting a Messiah, but no Jew or Christian at this stage would have believed that they were prophets. Yet they were also motivated by political considerations: in the old days, they had gained power in the oasis by throwing in their lot with one or the other warring Arab tribe. Muhammad, however, had joined both these tribes with the Quraysh in the new Muslim ummah, a kind of super-tribe of which the Jews were also members. As they saw their position in Medina decline, the Jews became antagonistic. They used to assemble in the mosque “to listen to the stories of the Muslims and laugh and scoff at their religion.”³¹ It was very easy for them, with their superior knowledge of scripture, to pick holes in the stories of the Koran—some of which differed markedly from the biblical version. They also jeered at Muhammad’s pretensions, saying that it was very odd that a man who claimed to be a prophet could not even find his camel when it went missing.

穆罕默德被犹太人拒绝，或许是他一生中最令人失望的事，也让他对自己的整个宗教立场产生了质疑。但有些犹太人对他很友好，似乎以荣誉身份加入了穆斯林。他们与他探讨《圣经》，并教他如何反驳其他犹太人的批评。这些关于经文的新知识也帮助穆罕默德发展了自己的见解。穆罕默德第一次了解了先知们的确切年表，此前他对这方面一直有些模糊。他现在明白，亚伯拉罕生活在​​摩西和耶稣之前这一点非常重要。此前，穆罕默德可能认为犹太教徒和基督教徒都属于同一个宗教，但现在他了解到，他们之间存在着严重的分歧。对于阿拉伯人这样的外来者来说，这两种立场似乎并无太大区别，他们很容易认为，信奉《托拉》和《福音书》的人将一些不纯正的元素引入了哈尼菲亚（亚伯拉罕的纯正宗教），例如拉比们阐述的口传律法和亵渎神明的三位一体教义。穆罕默德还了解到，犹太人在他们自己的经文中被称作不信的民族，他们转而崇拜偶像，敬拜金牛犊。古兰经中对犹太人的批判十分详尽，这表明穆斯林当时一定感受到了犹太人的排斥带来的威胁，尽管古兰经仍然坚持认为，并非所有“早期启示的信徒”都^误入歧途，而且所有宗教本质上都是一体的。

Muhammad’s rejection by the Jews was probably the greatest disappointment in his life, and it called his whole religious position into question. But some of the Jews were friendly and seem to have joined the Muslims in an honorary capacity. They discussed the Bible with him and showed him how to rebuff the criticisms of other Jews, and this new knowledge of scripture also helped Muhammad to develop his own insights. For the first time Muhammad learned the exact chronology of the prophets, about which he had previously been somewhat hazy. He could now see that it was very important that Abraham had lived before either Moses or Jesus. Hitherto Muhammad probably thought that Jews and Christians both belonged to one religion, but now he learned that they had serious disagreements with one another. To outsiders like the Arabs there seemed little to choose between the two positions, and it seemed logical to imagine that the followers of the Torah and the Gospel had introduced inauthentic elements into the hanifiyyah, the pure religion of Abraham, such as the Oral Law elaborated by the Rabbis and the blasphemous doctrine of the Trinity. Muhammad also learned that in their own scriptures the Jews were called a faithless people, who had turned to idolatry to worship the Golden Calf. The polemic against the Jews in the Koran is well developed and shows how threatened the Muslims must have felt by the Jewish rejection, even though the Koran still insists that not all “the people of earlier revelation”³² have fallen into error and that essentially all religions are one.

穆罕默德从麦地那友好的犹太人那里也听说了亚伯拉罕的长子以实玛利的故事。在《圣经》中，亚伯拉罕与他的妾夏甲生了一个儿子以实玛利，但当撒拉生下以撒后，她心生嫉妒，要求亚伯拉罕除掉夏甲和以实玛利。为了安慰亚伯拉罕，上帝应许以实玛利也将成为一个伟大民族的始祖。阿拉伯犹太人在此基础上添加了一些当地的传说，说亚伯拉罕把夏甲和以实玛利留在麦加谷，上帝在那里照顾他们，并在孩子渴死时向他显现了圣泉渗渗泉。后来，亚伯拉罕去看望了以实玛利，父子二人共同建造了克尔白，即第一座敬拜独一真神的圣殿。以实玛利成为了阿拉伯人的始祖，因此，他们和犹太人一样，都是亚伯拉罕的后裔。这番话想必令穆罕默德欣喜若狂：他不仅为阿拉伯人带来了他们自己的经文，现在又将他们带给了亚伯拉罕。他们可以把信仰根植于先祖的虔诚之中。公元624年1月，当麦地那犹太人的敌意已成定局时，真主的新兴宗教宣布独立。穆罕默德命令穆斯林面向麦加而非耶路撒冷祈祷。这种改变祈祷方向（朝向）的举措被誉为穆罕默德最具创造性的宗教举动。穆斯林面向独立于先前两次启示的克尔白叩拜，实际上是在宣告他们不属于任何既定宗教，而是完全臣服于真主。他们并非加入一个亵渎神明、将独一真主的宗教分裂成相互争斗的派别。相反，他们是在回归亚伯拉罕的原始宗教。亚伯拉罕是第一个臣服于真主的穆斯林，也是他建造了圣殿。

From the friendly Jews of Medina, Muhammad also learned the story of Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son. In the Bible, Abraham had had a son by his concubine Hagar, but when Sarah had borne Isaac she had become jealous and demanded that he get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. To comfort Abraham, God promised that Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation. The Arabian Jews had added some local legends of their own, saying that Abraham had left Hagar and Ishmael in the valley of Mecca, where God had taken care of them, revealing the sacred spring of Zamzam when the child was dying of thirst. Later Abraham had visited Ishmael and together father and son had built the Kabah, the first temple of the one God. Ishmael had become the father of the Arabs, so, like the Jews, they too were sons of Abraham. This must have been music to Muhammad’s ears: he was bringing the Arabs their own scripture and now he could root their faith in the piety of their ancestors. In January 624, when it was clear that the hostility of the Medinan Jews was permanent, the new religion of al-Lah declared its independence. Muhammad commanded the Muslims to pray facing Mecca instead of Jerusalem. This changing of the direction of prayer (qibla) has been called Muhammad’s most creative religious gesture. By prostrating themselves in the direction of the Kabah, which was independent of the two older revelations, Muslims were tacitly declaring that they belonged to no established religion but were surrendering themselves to God alone. They were not joining a sect that impiously divided the religion of the one God into warring groups. Instead they were returning to the primordial religion of Abraham, who had been the first muslim to surrender to God and who had built his holy house:

用人类对真理的解释来代替上帝本身，这无疑是偶像崇拜。

It was, surely, idolatry to prefer a merely human interpretation of the truth to God himself.

穆斯林划定纪年并非始于穆罕默德的诞辰，也非始于首次启示之年——毕竟，这些并非什么新鲜事——而是始于迁徙（希吉拉）之年。自此，穆斯林开始在历史上实践真主的计划，将伊斯兰教变为现实。我们已经看到，《古兰经》教导所有宗教人士都有义务为建立一个公正平等的社会而努力，而穆斯林也确实非常认真地履行了他们的政治使命。穆罕默德最初并没有打算成为政治领袖，但一些他无法预见的事件促使他为阿拉伯人找到了一种全新的政治解决方案。在迁徙至公元632年穆罕默德去世的十年间，他和他的第一批穆斯林与麦地那的反对者和麦加的古莱什人展开了殊死搏斗，这些人随时准备消灭整个穆斯林社群。在西方，人们常常将穆罕默德描绘成一位军阀，用武力将伊斯兰教强加于不情愿的世界。但事实并非如此。穆罕默德当时是在为生存而战，他在《古兰经》中阐述了一套正义战争的神学，这套神学大多数基督徒都会认同。他从未强迫任何人皈依伊斯兰教。事实上，《古兰经》明确指出“宗教中绝无强迫”。《古兰经》认为战争是可憎的；唯一正义的战争是自卫战争。有时为了维护正义的价值观，战争是必要的，正如基督徒认为对抗希特勒是必要的。穆罕默德拥有极高的政治才能。在他生命的最后阶段，大多数阿拉伯部落都加入了穆斯林社群（乌玛），尽管穆罕默德很清楚，这些部落的伊斯兰教信仰大多只是名义上的或流于表面。公元630年，麦加城向穆罕默德敞开了大门，他兵不血刃地攻占了这座城市。公元 632 年，在他去世前不久，他进行了所谓的告别朝圣，将古老的阿拉伯异教朝觐仪式伊斯兰化，并将阿拉伯人非常珍视的朝圣活动，作为他宗教的第五大“支柱”。

Muslims date their era not from the birth of Muhammad nor from the year of the first revelations—there was, after all, nothing new about these—but from the year of the hijra (the migration to Medina) when Muslims began to implement the divine plan in history by making Islam a political reality. We have seen that the Koran teaches that all religious people have a duty to work for a just and equal society, and Muslims have taken their political vocation very seriously indeed. Muhammad had not intended to become a political leader at the outset, but events that he could not have foreseen had pushed him toward an entirely new political solution for the Arabs. During the ten years between the hijra and his death in 632 Muhammad and his first Muslims were engaged in a desperate struggle for survival against his opponents in Medina and the Quraysh of Mecca, all of whom were ready to exterminate the ummah. In the West, Muhammad has often been presented as a warlord, who imposed Islam on a reluctant world by force of arms. The reality was quite different. Muhammad was fighting for his life, was evolving a theology of the just war in the Koran with which most Christians would agree, and never forced anybody to convert to his religion. Indeed the Koran is clear that there is to be “no compulsion in religion.” In the Koran war is held to be abhorrent; the only just war is a war of self-defense. Sometimes it is necessary to fight in order to preserve decent values, as Christians believed it necessary to fight against Hitler. Muhammad had political gifts of a very high order. By the end of his life most of the Arabian tribes had joined the ummah, even though, as Muhammad well knew, their islam was either nominal or superficial for the most part. In 630 the city of Mecca opened its gates to Muhammad, who was able to take it without bloodshed. In 632, shortly before his death, he made what has been called the Farewell Pilgrimage, in which he Islamized the old Arabian pagan rites of the hajj and made this pilgrimage, which was so dear to the Arabs, the fifth “pillar” of his religion.

所有穆斯林都有义务一生中至少朝觐一次，只要条件允许。朝觐者自然会缅怀穆罕默德，但朝觐仪式的意义在于让他们想起亚伯拉罕、夏甲和以实玛利，而非先知穆罕默德。这些仪式在外人看来或许有些怪异——任何异域的社会或宗教仪式都会如此——但它们却能激发强烈的宗教体验，完美地诠释伊斯兰灵性的社群性和个人性。如今，成千上万在指定时间聚集在麦加的朝觐者中，许多人并非阿拉伯人，但他们已将这些古老的阿拉伯仪式融入自身。当他们身着抹去种族和阶级差异的传统朝觐服饰，汇聚在克尔白前时，他们感到自己已从日常生活的自我中心中解脱出来，融入到一个拥有共同目标和方向的社群之中。他们齐声高呼：“真主啊，我愿为您效劳！”随后开始绕圣陵转圈。已故伊朗哲学家阿里·沙里亚蒂对这一仪式的本质意义做了很好的阐述：

All Muslims have a duty to make the hajj at least once in a lifetime if their circumstances permit. Naturally the pilgrims remember Muhammad, but the rites have been interpreted to remind them of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael rather than their prophet. These rites look bizarre to an outsider—as do any alien social or religious rituals—but they are able to unleash an intense religious experience and perfectly express the communal and personal aspects of Islamic spirituality. Today many of the thousands of pilgrims who assemble at the appointed time in Mecca are not Arabs, but they have been able to make the ancient Arabic ceremonies their own. As they converge on the Kabah, clad in the traditional pilgrim dress that obliterates all distinctions of race or class, they feel that they have been liberated from the egotistic preoccupations of their daily lives and been caught up into a community that has one focus and orientation. They cry in unison, “Here I am at your service, O al-Lah,” before they begin the circumambulations around the shrine. The essential meaning of this rite is brought out well by the late Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati:

犹太教和基督教也强调社群的灵性。朝觐为每位穆斯林提供了融入乌玛（穆斯林社群）的机会，而真主是其核心。如同大多数宗教一样，和平与和谐是朝觐的重要主题，一旦朝觐者进入圣地，任何形式的暴力都将被禁止。朝觐者甚至不能杀死昆虫或说一句粗话。因此， 1987年朝觐期间，伊朗朝觐者引发骚乱，造成402人死亡、649人受伤，这在整个穆斯林世界引起了强烈愤慨。

Jews and Christians have also emphasized the spirituality of community. The hajj offers each individual Muslim the experience of a personal integration in the context of the ummah, with God at its center. As in most religions, peace and harmony are important pilgrimage themes, and once the pilgrims have entered the sanctuary violence of any kind is forbidden. Pilgrims may not even kill an insect or speak a harsh word. Hence the outrage throughout the Muslim world during the hajj of 1987, when Iranian pilgrims instigated a riot in which 402 people were killed and 649 injured.

公元632年6月，穆罕默德因病去世，享年不详。他去世后，一些贝都因人试图脱离伊斯兰社群，但阿拉伯半岛的政治统一得以维系。最终，这些桀骜不驯的部落也接受了独一真主的宗教：穆罕默德的惊人成就向阿拉伯人表明，几个世纪以来一直为他们服务的异教信仰在现代社会已不再适用。真主的宗教引入了慈悲的精神，这正是更先进宗教的标志：博爱和社会正义是其至关重要的美德。强烈的平等主义将继续成为伊斯兰理想的特征。

Muhammad died unexpectedly after a short illness in June 632. After his death, some of the Bedouin tried to break away from the ummah, but the political unity of Arabia held firm. Eventually the recalcitrant tribes also accepted the religion of the one God: Muhammad’s astonishing success had shown the Arabs that the paganism which had served them well for centuries no longer worked in the modern world. The religion of al-Lah introduced the compassionate ethos which was the hallmark of the more advanced religions: brotherhood and social justice were its crucial virtues. A strong egalitarianism would continue to characterize the Islamic ideal.

在穆罕默德的时代，这其中就包括性别平等。如今，西方普遍将伊斯兰教描绘成一种本质上厌女的宗教，但与基督教一样，真主的宗教最初对女性持积极态度。在伊斯兰教出现之前的蒙昧时期（jahiliyyah），阿拉伯半岛保留了轴心时代之前盛行的女性观念。例如，一夫多妻制很普遍，妻子留在娘家。精英女性享有相当大的权力和声望——例如，穆罕默德的第一任妻子赫蒂彻就是一位成功的商人——但大多数女性的地位与奴隶无异；她们没有任何政治权利或人权，杀害女婴的现象十分普遍。女性是穆罕默德最早的皈依者之一，解放她们是他极为重视的事业。《古兰经》严禁杀害女童，并谴责阿拉伯人对女孩出生的恐惧。它还赋予女性法律权利。继承权和离婚：直到十九世纪，大多数西方女性都没有类似的权利。穆罕默德鼓励女性在穆斯林社群（乌玛）的事务中发挥积极作用，她们也坦率地表达自己的观点，并相信自己的声音会被听到。例如，有一次，麦地那的妇女们向先知抱怨说，男人们在学习《古兰经》方面远远超过了她们，并请求他帮助她们赶上。穆罕默德答应了她们的请求。她们提出的一个最重要的问题是，既然女性也已经归顺了真主，为什么《古兰经》只针对男性？最终的启示是，这部启示既针对男性也针对女性，并强调了两性在道德和精神上的绝对平等。^此后，《古兰经》经常明确地谈到女性，这在犹太教和基督教的经典中都极为罕见。

During Muhammad’s lifetime, this had included the equality of the sexes. Today it is common in the West to depict Islam as an inherently misogynistic religion, but, like Christianity, the religion of al-Lah was originally positive for women. During the jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic period, Arabia had preserved the attitudes toward women which had prevailed before the Axial Age. Polygamy, for example, was common, and wives remained in their father’s households. Elite women enjoyed considerable power and prestige—Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, for example, was a successful merchant—but the majority were on a par with slaves; they had no political or human rights, and female infanticide was common. Women had been among Muhammad’s earliest converts, and their emancipation was a project that was dear to his heart. The Koran strictly forbade the killing of female children and rebuked the Arabs for their dismay when a girl was born. It also gave women legal rights of inheritance and divorce: most Western women had nothing comparable until the nineteenth century. Muhammad encouraged women to play an active role in the affairs of the ummah, and they expressed their views forthrightly, confident that they would be heard. On one occasion, for example, the women of Medina had complained to the Prophet that the men were outstripping them in the study of the Koran and asked him to help them catch up. This Muhammad did. One of their most important questions was why the Koran addressed men only when women had also made their surrender to God. The result was a revelation that addressed women as well as men and emphasized the absolute moral and spiritual equality of the sexes.³⁵ Thereafter the Koran quite frequently addressed women explicitly, something that rarely happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures.

不幸的是，如同基督教一样，伊斯兰教后来也被男性所利用，他们对经文的解读对穆斯林女性不利。《古兰经》并非规定所有女性都必须戴面纱，而只是穆罕默德的妻子们必须戴面纱，以此作为她们身份的象征。然而，伊斯兰教在文明世界占据一席之地后，穆斯林却沿袭了那些将女性贬为二等公民的习俗。他们从波斯和基督教拜占庭帝国那里继承了给女性戴面纱并将她们隔离在后宫的习俗，而这些地方的女性长期以来都遭受着这种边缘化待遇。到了阿拔斯王朝时期（750-1258年），穆斯林女性的地位与犹太教和基督教社会中的女性一样糟糕。如今，穆斯林女权主义者呼吁她们的男性同胞回归《古兰经》的本源精神。

Unfortunately, as in Christianity, the religion was later hijacked by the men, who interpreted texts in a way that was negative for Muslim women. The Koran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad’s wives, as a mark of their status. Once Islam had taken its place in the civilized world, however, Muslims adopted those customs of the Oikumene which relegated women to second-class status. They adopted the customs of veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia and Christian Byzantium, where women had long been marginalized in this way. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), the position of Muslim women was as bad as that of their sisters in Jewish and Christian society. Today Muslim feminists urge their menfolk to return to the original spirit of the Koran.

这提醒我们，如同其他任何信仰一样，伊斯兰教也可以有多种不同的解读；因此，它也发展出了自身的教派和分歧。其中第一个分歧——逊尼派和什叶派之间的分歧——在穆罕默德突然去世后争夺领导权的斗争中就已初见端倪。穆罕默德的挚友阿布·伯克尔被多数人推选为哈里发，但一些人认为，穆罕默德会希望由他的堂弟兼女婿阿里·伊本·阿比·塔利卜继承他的职位（哈里发）。阿里本人接受了阿布·伯克尔的领导，但在接下来的几年里，他似乎成为了那些反对前三位哈里发——阿布·伯克尔、欧麦尔·伊本·哈塔卜和奥斯曼·伊本·阿凡——政策的异议人士的拥护对象。最终，阿里于公元656年成为第四任哈里发：什叶派最终称他为第一位伊玛目，即“乌玛领袖”。逊尼派和什叶派之间的分裂，与其说是教义上的分歧，不如说是领导权上的分歧，这预示着政治在伊斯兰教中的重要性，包括其对真主的理解。什叶派阿里派（Shiah-i-Ali ）阿里的支持者仍然是少数，他们逐渐发展出一种虔诚的抗议精神，穆罕默德的孙子侯赛因·伊本·阿里的悲剧人物便是这种精神的典型代表。侯赛因拒绝接受倭马亚王朝（在其父阿里去世后夺取了哈里发之位），并于公元680年在卡尔巴拉平原（今伊拉克库法附近）与他的一小群支持者一起被倭马亚王朝哈里发叶齐德杀害。所有穆斯林都对侯赛因惨遭屠杀感到震惊，但他尤其成为什叶派的英雄，提醒人们有时必须与暴政斗争至死。此时，穆斯林已经开始建立他们的帝国。前四位哈里发只致力于在拜占庭帝国和波斯帝国的阿拉伯人中传播伊斯兰教，而这两个帝国当时都处于衰落之中。然而，在倭马亚王朝统治下，扩张继续向亚洲和北非推进，其动力与其说是宗教，不如说是阿拉伯帝国主义。

This reminds us that, like any other faith, Islam could be interpreted in a number of different ways; consequently it evolved its own sects and divisions. The first of these—that between the Sunnah and Shiah—was prefigured in the struggle for the leadership after Muhammad’s sudden death. Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close friend, was elected by the majority, but some believed that he would have wanted Ali ibn Abi Talib, his cousin and son-in-law, to be his successor (kalipha). Ali himself accepted Abu Bakr’s leadership, but during the next few years he seems to have been the focus of the loyalty of dissidents who disapproved of the policies of the first three caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan. Finally Ali became the fourth caliph in 656: the Shiah would eventually call him the first Imam or Leader of the ummah. Concerned with the leadership, the split between Sunnis and Shiis was political rather than doctrinal, and this heralded the importance of politics in Muslim religion, including its conception of God. The Shiah-i-Ali (the Partisans of Ali) remained a minority and would develop a piety of protest, typified by the tragic figure of Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali, who refused to accept the Ummayads (who had seized the caliphate after the death of his father Ali) and was killed with his small band of supporters by the Ummayad Caliph Yazid in 680 on the plain of Karbala, near Kufa in modern Iraq. All Muslims regard the immoral slaughter of Husayn with horror, but he has become a particular hero of the Shiah, a reminder that it is sometimes necessary to fight tyranny to the death. By this time, the Muslims had begun to establish their empire. The first four caliphs had been concerned only to spread Islam among the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian empires, which were both in a state of decline. Under the Ummayads, however, the expansion continued into Asia and North Africa, inspired not by religion so much as by Arab imperialism.

在新帝国中，没有人被迫接受伊斯兰教；事实上，在穆罕默德去世后的一个世纪里，皈依伊斯兰教并不被鼓励，大约在公元700年左右，皈依伊斯兰教甚至被法律禁止：穆斯林认为伊斯兰教是阿拉伯人的宗教，正如犹太教是雅各之子（雅各的后裔）的宗教一样。作为“有经人”（ahl al-kitab ），犹太人和基督徒作为受保护的少数群体（齐米）享有宗教自由。当阿拔斯王朝的哈里发开始鼓励皈依伊斯兰教时，帝国境内的许多闪米特人和雅利安人渴望接受这一新的宗教。伊斯兰教的成功对伊斯兰教的形成产生了深远的影响，正如耶稣的失败和屈辱对基督教的影响一样。与基督教不同，政治并非与穆斯林的个人宗教生活无关，基督教并不信任世俗的成功。穆斯林认为自己致力于按照真主的旨意建立一个公正的社会。穆斯林社群（乌玛）具有神圣的意义，它象征着上帝祝福了这项将人类从压迫和不公中拯救出来的努力；其政治健康状况在穆斯林的灵性生活中占据着与基督徒信仰中特定的神学选择（天主教、新教、卫理公会、浸信会）同等重要的地位。如果基督徒觉得穆斯林对政治的重视很奇怪，他们也应该反思，他们对深奥神学辩论的热情，在犹太人和穆斯林看来同样令人费解。

Nobody in the new empire was forced to accept the Islamic faith; indeed, for a century after Muhammad’s death, conversion was not encouraged and, in about 700, was actually forbidden by law: Muslims believed that Islam was for the Arabs as Judaism was for the sons of Jacob. As the “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab), Jews and Christians were granted religious liberty as dhimmis, protected minority groups. When the Abbasid caliphs began to encourage conversion, many of the Semitic and Aryan peoples in their empire were eager to accept the new religion. The success of Islam was as formative as the failure and humiliation of Jesus have been in Christianity. Politics is not extrinsic to a Muslim’s personal religious life, as in Christianity, which mistrusts mundane success. Muslims regard themselves as committed to implementing a just society in accord with God’s will. The ummah has sacramental importance, as a “sign” that God has blessed this endeavor to redeem humanity from oppression and injustice; its political health holds much the same place in a Muslim’s spirituality as a particular theological option (Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptist) in the life of a Christian. If Christians find the Muslims’ regard for politics strange, they should reflect that their passion for abstruse theological debate seems equally bizarre to Jews and Muslims.

因此，在伊斯兰历史的早期，关于上帝本质的推测往往源于对哈里发政权和统治阶层的政治关切。关于谁应该领导穆斯林社群（乌玛）以及由何种人领导的学术辩论，其对伊斯兰教的影响，堪比基督教中关于耶稣的身份和本质的辩论。在拉希顿（前四位“正统哈里发”）时期之后，穆斯林发现他们生活在一个与以往截然不同的世界。麦地那社会陷入困境。他们如今统治着一个不断扩张的帝国，但他们的领袖似乎被世俗和贪婪所驱使。贵族阶层和宫廷中充斥着奢靡和腐败，这与先知及其同伴们清苦的生活方式截然不同。最虔诚的穆斯林以《古兰经》中的社会主义思想挑战着既有体制，并试图使伊斯兰教适应新的形势。由此，各种不同的解决方案和教派应运而生。

In the early years of Islamic history, therefore, speculation about the nature of God often sprang from a political concern about the state of the caliphate and the establishment. Learned debates about who and what manner of man should lead the ummah proved to be as formative in Islam as debates about the person and nature of Jesus in Christianity. After the period of the rashidun (the first four “rightly guided” caliphs), Muslims found that they were living in a world very different from the small, embattled society of Medina. They were now masters of an expanding empire, and their leaders seemed motivated by worldliness and greed. There were a luxury and corruption among the aristocracy and in the court that were very different from the austere lives led by the Prophet and his companions. The most pious Muslims challenged the establishment with the socialist message of the Koran and tried to make Islam relevant to the new conditions. A number of different solutions and sects emerged.

最受欢迎的解决方案是由法学家和圣训学家提出的，他们试图回归穆罕默德及其圣贤（Rashidun）的理想。这最终形成了伊斯兰教法（Shariah），这是一部类似于《托拉》（Torah）的法典，以《古兰经》以及先知的生平和格言为基础。关于穆罕默德及其早期同伴的言行（圣训， Hadith）和圣行（Sunnah）的大量口头传述在当时流传，这些传述在八、九世纪被许多编纂者收集整理，其中最著名的是穆罕默德·伊本·伊斯玛仪·布哈里和穆斯林·伊本·希贾吉·库沙伊里。由于人们相信穆罕默德完全顺服于真主，穆斯林应当在日常生活中效仿他。因此，通过效仿穆罕默德的言谈举止、爱的方式、饮食习惯、洗漱方式和敬拜方式，伊斯兰教法帮助穆斯林过上一种向神敞开的生活。他们效仿先知，希望获得他那份对真主的内在敬畏之心。因此，当穆斯林遵循圣行，像穆罕默德那样以“愿真主赐予你平安”（Salaam alaykum ）互致问候；当他们像他那样善待动物、孤儿和穷人；当他们慷慨待人、值得信赖时，他们便会想起真主。这些外在的举动本身并非目的，而是获得敬畏真主（taqwa ）的途径。敬畏真主是《古兰经》所规定的，也是先知所实践的，它包含着对真主的持续记念（dhikr ）。关于圣行和圣训的有效性，一直存在诸多争论：有些被认为比其他的更为可靠。但归根结底，这些传统的历史真实性问题远不如它们行之有效这一事实重要：几个世纪以来，它们已证明能够将神圣的感悟带入数百万穆斯林的生活中。

The most popular solution was found by legists and traditionists who attempted to return to the ideals of Muhammad and the rashidun. This resulted in the formation of the Shariah law, a code similar to the Torah which was based on the Koran and the life and maxims of the Prophet. A bewildering number of oral traditions were in circulation about the words (hadith) and practice (sunnah) of Muhammad and his early companions, and these were collected during the eighth and ninth centuries by a number of editors, the most famous of whom were Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hijjaj al-Qushayri. Because Muhammad was believed to have surrendered perfectly to God, Muslims were to imitate him in their daily lives. Thus by imitating the way Muhammad spoke, loved, ate, washed and worshipped, the Islamic Holy Law helped Muslims to live a life that was open to the divine. By modeling themselves on the Prophet, they hoped to acquire his interior receptivity to God. Thus when Muslims follow a sunnah by greeting one another with the words “Salaam alaykum” (Peace be with you) as Muhammad used to do, when they are kind to animals, to orphans and the poor as he was and are generous and reliable in their dealings with others, they are reminded of God. The external gestures are not to be regarded as ends in themselves but as a means of acquiring taqwa, the “God-consciousness” prescribed by the Koran and practiced by the Prophet, which consists of a constant remembrance of God (dhikr). There has been much debate about the validity of the sunnah and hadith: some are regarded as more authentic than others. But ultimately the question of the historical validity of these traditions is less important than the fact that they have worked: they have proved able to bring a sacramental sense of the divine into the lives of millions of Muslims over the centuries.

圣训，即先知的格言集，大多涉及日常事务，但也涉及形而上学、宇宙论和神学。人们相信其中一些圣训是真主亲自对穆罕默德说的。这些圣训强调真主的内在性和临在性，尤其强调真主在信徒心中的存在。其中一条著名的圣训是……例如，列举了穆斯林领悟神圣存在（这种神圣存在似乎几乎化身于信徒身上）的各个阶段：首先要遵守《古兰经》和《伊斯兰教法》的诫命，然后逐步发展到自愿的虔诚行为：

The hadith or collected maxims of the Prophet are mostly concerned with everyday matters but also with metaphysics, cosmology and theology. A number of these sayings are believed to have been spoken by God himself to Muhammad. These hadith qudsi (sacred traditions) emphasize God’s immanence and presence in the believer: one famous hadith, for example, lists the stages whereby a Muslim apprehends a divine presence which seems almost incarnate in the believer: you begin by observing the commandments of the Koran and Shariah and then progress to voluntary acts of piety:

如同犹太教和基督教一样，超越的上帝也以内在临在的形式存在于人间。穆斯林可以通过与这两种古老宗教非常相似的方式来培养对这种神圣临在的感知。

As in Judaism and Christianity, the transcendent God is also an immanent presence encountered here below. The Muslims could cultivate a sense of this divine presence by methods very similar to those discovered by the two older religions.

那些倡导以效法穆罕默德为基础的虔诚信仰的穆斯林，通常被称为圣训派（ahl al-hadith）。他们深受普通民众的喜爱，因为他们秉持着一种强烈的平等主义伦理。他们反对倭马亚王朝和阿拔斯王朝宫廷的奢靡生活，但也不赞同什叶派的革命策略。他们认为哈里发无需具备超凡的灵性，他仅仅是一位管理者。然而，通过强调《古兰经》和圣训的神圣性，他们为每位穆斯林提供了与真主直接沟通的途径，这种途径具有潜在的颠覆性，并对绝对权力提出了强烈的批判。他们不需要一个祭司阶层作为调解人。每位穆斯林都要在真主面前为自己的命运负责。

The Muslims who promoted this type of piety based on the imitation of Muhammad are generally known as the ahl al-hadith, the Traditionists. They appealed to the ordinary people, because theirs was a fiercely egalitarian ethic. They opposed the luxury of the Ummayad and Abbasid courts but were not in favor of the revolutionary tactics of the Shiah. They did not believe that the caliph need have exceptional spiritual qualities: he was simply an administrator. Yet by stressing the divine nature of the Koran and the sunnah, they provided each Muslim with the means of direct contact with God that was potentially subversive and highly critical of absolute power. There was no need for a caste of priests to act as mediators. Each Muslim was responsible before God for his or her own fate.

最重要的是，传统主义者教导说，《古兰经》是永恒的现实，它如同《托拉》或逻各斯一样，某种程度上源于上帝本身；它自时间之初就存在于上帝的意念之中。他们关于《古兰经》非受造的教义意味着，当穆斯林诵读《古兰经》时，他们可以直接聆听到不可见的上帝的声音。《古兰经》象征着上帝就在他们中间。当他们诵读其神圣的经文时，上帝的言语便在他们的唇间流淌；当他们手捧这本圣书时，就如同触摸到了神圣本身。早期基督徒对耶稣其人也有着类似的看法：

Above all, the Traditionists taught that the Koran was an eternal reality which, like the Torah or the Logos, was somehow of God himself; it had dwelt in his mind from before the beginning of time. Their doctrine of the uncreated Koran meant that when it was recited, Muslims could hear the invisible God directly. The Koran represented the presence of God in their very midst. His speech was on their lips when they recited its sacred words, and when they held the holy book it was as though they had touched the divine itself. The early Christians had thought of Jesus the man in a similar way:

耶稣作为“道”的确切地位，一直令基督徒们十分困惑。如今，穆斯林也开始探讨《古兰经》的本质：这部阿拉伯文经典究竟在何种意义上才是真正的“上帝之言”？一些穆斯林认为，这种对《古兰经》的抬高，与那些因耶稣是道成肉身的“道”这一说法而感到震惊的基督徒一样，都是亵渎神明的行为。

The exact status of Jesus, the Word, had greatly exercised Christians. Now Muslims would begin to debate the nature of the Koran: in what sense was the Arabic text really the Word of God? Some Muslims found this elevation of the Koran as blasphemous as those Christians who had been scandalized by the idea that Jesus had been the incarnate Logos.

然而，什叶派逐渐发展出一些与基督教道成肉身更为接近的思想。侯赛因不幸去世后，什叶派坚信只有他父亲阿里·伊本·阿比·塔利卜的后裔才有资格领导穆斯林社群（乌玛），并由此成为伊斯兰教内一个独特的派别。作为穆罕默德的堂兄兼女婿，阿里与穆罕默德有着双重血缘关系。由于先知没有儿子活到成年，阿里是他最重要的男性亲属。在《古兰经》中，先知们经常祈求真主保佑他们的后裔。什叶派进一步延伸了这种神圣祝福的概念，并开始相信只有通过阿里家族传承下来的穆罕默德家族成员才拥有关于真主的真正知识（伊勒姆）。只有他们才能为穆斯林社群提供神圣的指引。如果阿里的后裔掌权，穆斯林就能迎来一个公正的黄金时代，穆斯林社群也将按照真主的旨意得到领导。

The Shiah, however, gradually evolved ideas that seemed even closer to Christian Incarnation. After the tragic death of Husayn, Shiis became convinced that only the descendants of his father, Ali ibn Abi Talib, should lead the ummah, and they became a distinctive sect within Islam. As his cousin and son-in-law, Ali had a double blood tie with Muhammad. Since none of the Prophet’s sons had survived infancy, Ali was his chief male relative. In the Koran, prophets often ask God to bless their descendants. The Shiis extended this notion of divine blessing and came to believe that only members of Muhammad’s family through the house of Ali had true knowledge (ilm) of God. They alone could provide the ummah with divine guidance. If a descendant of Ali came to power, Muslims could look forward to a golden age of justice, and the ummah would be led according to God’s will.

人们对阿里的崇拜以一些出人意料的方式发展起来。一些较为激进的什叶派团体将阿里及其后裔的地位提升到高于穆罕默德本人，并赋予他们近乎神圣的地位。他们借鉴了古老的波斯传统，即神拣选的家族将神圣的荣耀代代相传。到了倭马亚王朝末期，一些什叶派穆斯林开始相信，权威的知识（伊玛目）保存在阿里后裔的某一特定分支中。穆斯林只能在这个家族中找到真主指定的真正伊玛目（乌玛的领袖） 。无论他是否掌权，他的指导都至关重要，因此每个穆斯林都有义务寻找他并接受他的领导。由于这些伊玛目被视为不满的焦点，哈里发们将他们视为国家敌人：根据什叶派的传统，一些伊玛目遭到毒害，另一些则被迫隐匿。每位伊玛目去世后，都会指定一位亲属继承其学问。渐渐地，伊玛目们被尊为神圣的化身：每一位伊玛目都曾……他是上帝在世间存在的“证明”（hujjah），在某种神秘的意义上，他使神性化身为人。他的言语、决定和命令都来自上帝。正如基督徒视耶稣为道路、真理和光明，引领世人走向上帝一样，什叶派穆斯林也尊崇他们的伊玛目为通往上帝的门户（bab）、道路（sabil）以及每一代人的指路人。

The enthusiasm for the person of Ali would develop in some surprising ways. Some of the more radical Shii groups would elevate Ali and his descendants to a position above that of Muhammad himself and give them near-divine status. They were drawing on ancient Persian tradition of a chosen god-begotten family which transmitted the divine glory from one generation to another. By the end of the Ummayad period, some Shiis had come to believe that the authoritative ilm was retained in one particular line of Ali’s descendants. Muslims would only find the person designated by God as the true Imam (leader) of the ummah in this family. Whether he was in power or not, his guidance was absolutely necessary, so every Muslim had a duty to look for him and accept his leadership. Since these Imams were seen as a focus of disaffection, the caliphs regarded them as enemies of state: according to Shii tradition, several of the Imams were poisoned and some had to go into hiding. When each Imam died, he would choose one of his relatives to inherit the ilm. Gradually the Imams were revered as avatars of the divine: each one had been a “proof” (hujjah) of God’s presence on earth and, in some mysterious sense, made the divine incarnate in a human being. His words, decisions and commands were God’s. As Christians had seen Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Light that would lead men to God, Shiis revered their Imams as the gateway (bab) to God, the road (sabil) and the guide of each generation.

什叶派各分支对神圣传承的追溯各不相同。例如，“十二伊玛目派”尊崇阿里通过侯赛因的十二位后裔，直到公元939年最后一位伊玛目隐遁，从此消失于世人之中；由于他没有后裔，这一传承就此断绝。被称为“七伊玛目派”的伊斯玛仪派则认为，这十二位伊玛目中的第七位就是最后一位。十二伊玛目派内部出现了一种弥赛亚主义倾向，他们相信第十二位或隐遁的伊玛目将会回归，开启一个黄金时代。这些显然是危险的思想。它们不仅具有政治颠覆性，而且很容易被粗浅地、简单化地解读。因此，更为极端的什叶派发展出一种基于对《古兰经》象征性解读的秘传传统，我们将在下一章中看到这一点。什叶派的虔诚对大多数穆斯林来说过于深奥，他们认为这种道成肉身的观念是亵渎神明的，因此什叶派通常聚集在贵族阶层和知识分子之中。自伊朗革命以来，西方往往将什叶派描绘成一个本质上是原教旨主义的伊斯兰教派，但这种看法并不准确。什叶派发展成为一种精深的传统。事实上，什叶派与那些试图系统地运用理性论证来解读《古兰经》的穆斯林有很多共同之处。这些理性主义者被称为穆尔太齐赖派，他们形成了一个独特的群体；他们也拥有坚定的政治立场：与什叶派一样，穆尔太齐赖派对宫廷的奢靡生活持强烈批判态度，并经常积极参与反对当权者的政治活动。

The various branches of the Shiah traced the divine succession differently. “Twelver Shiis,” for example, venerated twelve descendants of Ali through Husayn, until in 939 the last Imam went into hiding and disappeared from human society; since he had no descendants, the line died out. The Ismailis, known as the Seveners, believed that the seventh of these Imams had been the last. A messianic strain appeared among the Twelvers, who believed that the Twelfth or Hidden Imam would return to inaugurate a golden age. These were obviously dangerous ideas. Not only were they politically subversive, but they could easily be interpreted in a crude, simplistic way. The more extreme Shiis developed an esoteric tradition, therefore, based on a symbolic interpretation of the Koran, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their piety was too abstruse for most Muslims, who regarded this incarnational idea as blasphemous, so Shiis were usually found among the more aristocratic classes and the intellectuals. Since the Iranian revolution, we have tended in the West to depict Shiism as an inherently fundamentalist sect of Islam, but that is an inaccurate assessment. Shiism became a sophisticated tradition. In fact, Shiis had much in common with those Muslims who attempted to apply rational arguments systematically to the Koran. These rationalists, known as Mutazilis, formed their own distinctive group; they also had a firm political commitment: like the Shiis, Mutazilis were highly critical of the luxury of the court and were frequently politically active against the establishment.

这一政治问题引发了一场关于上帝如何治理人类事务的神学辩论。倭马亚王朝的支持者虚伪地声称，他们的非伊斯兰行为并非出于自身过错，而是因为上帝预定了他们成为这样的人。古兰经对上帝的绝对全能和全知有着非常强烈的理解，许多经文都可以用来支持这种预定论的观点。但古兰经同样强调人的责任：“真主绝不改变人的境况，除非他们改变自己的内心。” 因此，对当时统治阶级的批评者强调自由意志和道德责任。穆尔太齐赖派则采取了中间路线，并远离（i'tazahu，意为保持距离）极端立场。为了维护人类的伦理本质，他们捍卫自由意志。那些认为真主凌驾于人类是非观念之上的穆斯林，谴责真主的公正。一个违背一切正当原则却仅仅因为自己是真主而逍遥法外的神，简直就是个怪物，与暴君哈里发无异。与什叶派一样，穆尔太齐赖派宣称公正是真主的本质：他不会伤害任何人；他不会颁布任何违背理性的法令。

The political question inspired a theological debate about God’s government of human affairs. Supporters of the Ummayads had rather disingenuously claimed that their un-Islamic behavior was not their fault because they had been predestined by God to be the kind of people they were. The Koran has a very strong conception of God’s absolute omnipotence and omniscience, and many texts could be used to support this view of predestination. But the Koran is equally emphatic about human responsibility: “Verily, God does not change men’s condition unless they change their inner selves.” Consequently the critics of the establishment stressed free will and moral responsibility. The Mutazilis took a middle road and withdrew (i’tazahu, to stand aloof) from an extreme position. They defended free will in order to safeguard the ethical nature of humanity. Muslims who believed that God was above mere human notions of right and wrong were decrying his justice. A God who violated all decent principles and got away with it simply because he was God would be a monster, no better than a tyrannical caliph. Like the Shiis, the Mutazilis declared that justice was of the essence of God: he could not wrong anybody; he could not enjoin anything contrary to reason.

在此，他们与传统主义者产生了冲突。传统主义者认为，穆尔太齐赖派将人视为自身命运的创造者和主宰，是对上帝全能的亵渎。他们抱怨穆尔太齐赖派将上帝描绘得过于理性，过于像人。他们采纳预定论，是为了强调上帝本质上的不可理解性：如果我们声称能够理解上帝，那么他就不是上帝，而仅仅是人类的投射。上帝超越了人类对善恶的认知，不能被我们的标准和期望所束缚：一个行为之所以是邪恶或不公正的，是因为上帝的旨意如此，而不是因为这些人类价值观具有约束上帝本身的超越性维度。穆尔太齐赖派认为正义——一种纯粹的人类理想——是上帝的本质，这种说法是错误的。预定论与自由意志的问题也困扰着基督徒，这表明人格化的上帝观念存在一个核心难题。像梵天这样的非人格化的神，更容易被认为超越了“善”与“恶”的范畴，因为“善”与“恶”被视为神秘莫测的神性的面具。然而，如果一位神以某种神秘的方式具有人格，并积极参与人类历史，那么他便很容易受到批判。我们很容易将这位“神”塑造成一个超凡脱俗的暴君或审判者，并让他满足我们的各种期望。我们可以根据个人观点，将“神”变成共和党人、社会主义者、种族主义者或革命者。这种危险性导致一些人将人格化的神视为一种非宗教观念，因为它只会让我们深陷于自身的偏见之中，并将我们人类的观念奉为绝对真理。

Here they came into conflict with the Traditionists, who argued that by making man the author and creator of his own fate, the Mutazilis were insulting the omnipotence of God. They complained that the Mutazilis were making God too rational and too like a man. They adopted the doctrine of predestination in order to emphasize God’s essential incomprehensibility: if we claimed to understand him, he could not be God but was a mere human projection. God transcended mere human notions of good and evil and could not be tied down to our standards and expectations: an act was evil or unjust because God had decreed it to be so, not because these human values had a transcendent dimension binding upon God himself. The Mutazilis were wrong to say that justice, a purely human ideal, was of the essence of God. The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond “good” and “evil,” which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this “God” a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make “him” fulfill our expectations. We can turn “God” into a Republican or a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views. The danger of this has led some to see a personal God as an unreligious idea, because it simply embeds us in our own prejudice and makes our human ideas absolute.

为了避免这种危险，传统主义者提出了犹太教和基督教都沿用的、由来已久的区分，即上帝的本质与他的作为。他们声称，使超越的上帝能够与世界建立联系的某些属性——例如力量、知识、意志、听觉、视觉和语言（这些在《古兰经》中都归于真主安拉）——与上帝同在，如同《古兰经》本身一样，亘古不变。这些属性与上帝不可知的本质截然不同，后者永远无法被我们理解。正如犹太人认为上帝的智慧或律法与上帝同在一样。穆斯林从亘古之初就认识真主，如今他们发展出类似的理念来解释真主的位格，并提醒穆斯林，真主无法完全被人类的思维所理解。若非哈里发马蒙（813-832 年）偏袒穆尔太齐赖派，并试图将其思想定为伊斯兰教的官方教义，这种深奥的论证或许只会影响极少数人。但当哈里发开始对圣训派信徒施以酷刑，以强行推行穆尔太齐赖派的信仰时，普通民众对这种违背伊斯兰教义的行为感到震惊。艾哈迈德·伊本·罕百勒（780-855 年）是一位杰出的圣训派信徒，他在马蒙的宗教裁判所中侥幸逃脱死刑，并因此成为民众心目中的英雄。他的圣洁和魅力——他曾为折磨他的人祈祷——挑战了哈里发政权，他对非受造的《古兰经》的信仰成为反对穆尔太齐赖派理性主义的民粹主义起义的口号。

To avoid this danger, the Traditionists came up with the time-honored distinction, used by both Jews and Christians, between God’s essence and his activities. They claimed that some of those attributes which enabled the transcendent God to relate to the world—such as power, knowledge, will, hearing, sight and speech, which are all attributed to al-Lah in the Koran—had existed with him from all eternity in much the same way as the uncreated Koran. They were distinct from God’s unknowable essence, which would always elude our understanding. Just as Jews had imagined that God’s Wisdom or the Torah had existed with God from before the beginning of time, Muslims were now developing a similar idea to account for the personality of God and to remind Muslims that he could not be wholly contained by the human mind. Had not the Caliph al-Mamum (813–832) sided with the Mutazilis and attempted to make their ideas official Muslim doctrine, this abstruse argument would probably have affected a mere handful of people. But when the caliph began to torture the Traditionists in order to impose the Mutazili belief, the ordinary folk were horrified by this un-Islamic behavior. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855), a leading Traditionist who narrowly escaped death in al-Mamun’s inquisition, became a popular hero. His sanctity and charisma—he had prayed for his torturers—challenged the caliphate, and his belief in the uncreated Koran became the watchword of a populist revolt against the rationalism of the Mutazilah.

伊本·罕百勒拒绝接受任何关于上帝的理性讨论。因此，当温和的穆尔太齐赖派学者胡亚扬·卡拉比西（卒于公元859年）提出一种折衷方案——认为《古兰经》作为上帝的言辞，本身是非受造的，但当它被翻译成人类的语言时，就变成了受造之物——伊本·罕百勒便谴责了这一学说。卡拉比西很快又改变了自己的观点，宣称《古兰经》的阿拉伯语文本，无论书面还是口语，只要包含上帝永恒的言辞，都是非受造的。然而，伊本·罕百勒却宣称这种说法也是非法的，因为以这种理性主义的方式推测《古兰经》的起源既无用又危险。理性并非探索不可言说的上帝的合适工具。他指责穆尔太齐赖派剥夺了上帝的一切神秘性，将他变成了一个毫无宗教价值的抽象公式。当《古兰经》使用拟人化的词语来描述上帝在世间的活动，或者说上帝“说话”、“观看”和“坐在宝座上”时，伊本·罕百勒坚持要按字面意思解释，但“不追问其原理”（bila kayf）。他或许可以与阿塔纳修斯等激进的基督教徒相提并论，后者坚持对道成肉身教义进行极端解读，以对抗更为理性的异端。伊本·罕百勒强调的是神性的本质不可言说性，这种不可言说性超越了一切逻辑和概念分析的范畴。

Ibn Hanbal refused to countenance any kind of rational discussion about God. Thus when the moderate Mutazili al-Huayan al-Karabisi (d. 859) put forward a compromise solution—that the Koran considered as God’s speech was indeed uncreated but that when it was put into human words it became a created thing—Ibn Hanbal condemned the doctrine. Al-Karabisi was quite ready to modify his view again, and declared that the written and spoken Arabic of the Koran was uncreated in so far as it partook of God’s eternal speech. Ibn Hanbal, however, declared that this was unlawful too because it was useless and dangerous to speculate about the origin of the Koran in this rationalistic way. Reason was not an appropriate tool for exploring the unutterable God. He accused the Mutazilis of draining God of all mystery and making him an abstract formula that had no religious value. When the Koran used anthropomorphic terms to describe God’s activity in the world or when it said that God “speaks” and “sees” and “sits upon his throne,” Ibn Hanbal insisted that it be interpreted literally but “without asking how” (bila kayf). He can perhaps be compared to radical Christians like Athanasius, who insisted on an extreme interpretation of the doctrine of Incarnation against the more rational heretics. Ibn Hanbal was stressing the essential ineffability of the divine, which lay beyond the reach of all logic and conceptual analysis.

然而，《古兰经》不断强调智慧和理解的重要性，而伊本·罕百勒的立场则显得有些简单。许多穆斯林认为他的观点是离经叛道且晦涩难懂的。阿布·哈桑·伊本·伊斯梅尔·艾沙里（878-941）找到了一种折衷方案。他原本是穆尔太齐赖派信徒，但因一个梦境而皈依了圣训派。先知曾向他显现，敦促他研习圣训。然而，艾什阿里却走向了另一个极端，成为一名狂热的圣训主义者，并抨击穆尔太齐赖派是伊斯兰教的祸害。后来，他又做了一个梦，梦中穆罕默德显得有些恼怒，说道：“我没有让你放弃理性论证，而是让你支持真正的圣训！” ³⁸ 从此，艾什阿里开始运用穆尔太齐赖派的理性主义方法，来宣扬伊本·罕百勒的不可知论精神。穆尔太齐赖派声称真主的启示不可能不合情理，而艾什阿里则运用理性和逻辑来证明真主超越了我们的理解。穆尔太齐赖派曾有将真主简化为一个连贯但枯燥的概念的危险；艾什阿里则希望回归《古兰经》中那个血肉丰满的真主，尽管《古兰经》本身存在一些矛盾之处。事实上，如同阿雷奥帕吉特的德尼一样，他相信悖论能够加深我们对上帝的理解。他拒绝将上帝简化为一个可以像其他人类观念一样被讨论和分析的概念。知识、力量、生命等等神圣属性是真实存在的；它们自亘古以来就属于上帝。但它们与上帝的本质截然不同，因为上帝本质上是单一的、简单的、独一无二的。祂不能被视为复杂的存在，因为祂本身就是简单的；我们无法通过定义祂的各种特征或将祂分割成更小的部分来分析祂。艾什阿里拒绝任何试图解决悖论的尝试：因此，他坚持认为，当《古兰经》说上帝“坐在祂的宝座上”时，我们必须接受这是一个事实，即使我们无法理解一个纯粹的精神“坐着”。

Yet the Koran constantly emphasizes the importance of intelligence and understanding, and Ibn Hanbal’s position was somewhat simpleminded. Many Muslims found it perverse and obscurantist. A compromise was found by Abu al-Hasan ibn Ismail al-Ashari (878–941). He had been a Mutazili but was converted to Traditionism by a dream in which the Prophet had appeared to him and urged him to study hadith. Al-Ashari then went to the other extreme, became an ardent Traditionist and preached against the Mutazilah as the scourge of Islam. Then he had another dream, in which Muhammad looked rather irritated and said: “I did not tell you to give up rational arguments but to support the true hadiths!”³⁸ Henceforth al-Ashari used the rationalist techniques of the Mutazilah to promote the agnostic spirit of Ibn Hanbal. Where the Mutazilis claimed that God’s revelation could not be unreasonable, al-Ashari used reason and logic to show that God was beyond our understanding. The Mutazilis had been in danger of reducing God to a coherent but arid concept; al-Ashari wanted to return to the full-blooded God of the Koran, despite its inconsistency. Indeed, like Denys the Areopagite, he believed that paradox would enhance our appreciation of God. He refused to reduce God to a concept that could be discussed and analyzed like any other human idea. The divine attributes of knowledge, power, life and so on were real; they had belonged to God from all eternity. But they were distinct from God’s essence, because God was essentially one, simple and unique. He could not be regarded as a complex being because he was simplicity itself; we could not analyze him by defining his various characteristics or splitting him up into smaller parts. Al-Ashari refused any attempt to resolve the paradox: thus he insisted that when the Koran says that God “sits on his throne,” we must accept that this is a fact even though it is beyond our understanding to conceive of a pure spirit “sitting.”

艾什阿里试图在刻意晦涩和极端理性主义之间找到一条中间道路。一些字面主义者声称，如果蒙福之人真能像《古兰经》所说的那样在天堂“见到”真主，那么他必定拥有肉身。希沙姆·伊本·哈基姆甚至说：

Al-Ashari was trying to find a middle course between deliberate obscurantism and extreme rationalism. Some literalists claimed that if the blessed were going to “see” God in heaven, as the Koran said, he must have a physical appearance. Hisham ibn Hakim went so far as to say that:

一些什叶派穆斯林接受了这种观点，因为他们相信伊玛目是神的化身。穆尔太齐赖派则坚持认为，例如，当《古兰经》提到真主的“双手”时，必须将其解释为寓言，指的是真主的慷慨和仁慈。艾什阿里反对字面解释者，他指出《古兰经》明确指出我们可以谈论……他认为，关于上帝的论述只能用象征性的语言。但他同时也反对传统主义者全盘否定理性。他辩称，穆罕默德没有遇到这些问题，否则他会为穆斯林提供指导；事实上，所有穆斯林都有义务运用类比（qiyas）等解释工具来保留对上帝的真正宗教概念。

Some Shiis accepted such views, because of their belief that the Imams were incarnations of the divine. The Mutazilis insisted that when the Koran speaks of God’s “hands,” for example, this must be interpreted allegorically to refer to his generosity and munificence. Al-Ashari opposed the literalists by pointing out that the Koran insisted that we could talk about God only in symbolic language. But he also opposed the Traditionist wholesale rejection of reason. He argued that Muhammad had not encountered these problems or he would have given the Muslims guidance; as it was, all Muslims had a duty to use such interpretive tools as analogy (qiyas) to retain a truly religious concept of God.

阿什阿里始终选择折衷的立场。他认为《古兰经》是永恒的、非受造的真主圣言，但经文的墨水、纸张和阿拉伯文字却是被创造出来的。他谴责穆尔太齐赖派的自由意志论，因为只有真主才能“创造”人类的行为；但他同时也反对传统主义的观点，即人类对自身的救赎毫无贡献。他的解决方案略显曲折：真主创造了人类的行为，但允许人类因这些行为而获得功德或罪孽。然而，与伊本·罕百勒不同，阿什阿里愿意提出问题并探索这些形而上学的难题，尽管他最终得出结论：试图用一个条理清晰、理性化的体系来容纳我们称之为“真主”的神秘莫测、难以言喻的实在是错误的。阿什阿里创立了穆斯林的卡拉姆（Kalam，字面意思是“圣言”或“论述”）传统，通常被译为“神学”。十世纪和十一世纪的后继者们完善了卡拉姆的方法论，并发展了他的思想。早期的阿什阿里派希望建立一个形而上学的框架，以便对上帝的主权进行有效的探讨。阿什阿里派的第一位主要神学家是阿布·伯克尔·巴基拉尼（卒于1013年）。在他的著作《认主独一》（al-Tawhid）中，他赞同穆尔太齐赖派的观点，即人类可以通过理性论证来逻辑地证明上帝的存在：事实上，《古兰经》本身就记载了亚伯拉罕通过系统地思考自然界而发现了永恒的造物主。但巴基拉尼否认我们可以在没有启示的情况下区分善恶，因为善恶并非自然范畴，而是上帝的旨意：真主不受人类对是非对错观念的束缚。

Constantly al-Ashari opted for a compromise position. Thus he argued that the Koran was the eternal and uncreated Word of God but that the ink, paper and Arabic words of the sacred text were created. He condemned the Mutazili doctrine of free will, because God alone could be the “creator” of man’s deeds, but he also opposed the Traditionist view that men did not contribute at all to their salvation. His solution was somewhat tortuous: God creates the deeds but allows men to acquire merit or discredit for them. Unlike Ibn Hanbal, however, Al-Ashari was prepared to ask questions and to explore these metaphysical problems, even though ultimately he concluded that it was wrong to try to contain the mysterious and ineffable reality that we call God in a tidy, rationalistic system. Al-Ashari had founded the Muslim tradition of Kalam (literally, “word” or “discourse”), which is usually translated “theology.” His successors in the tenth and eleventh centuries refined the methodology of Kalam and developed his ideas. The early Asharites wanted to set up a metaphysical framework for a valid discussion of God’s sovereignty. The first major theologian of the Asharite school was Abu Bakr al-Baqillani (d. 1013). In his treatise al-Tawhid (Unity), he agreed with the Mutazilah that men could prove the existence of God logically with rational arguments: indeed the Koran itself shows Abraham discovering the eternal Creator by meditating systematically on the natural world. But al-Baqillani denied that we could distinguish between good and evil without a revelation, since these are not natural categories but have been decreed by God: al-Lah is not bound by human notions of what is right or wrong.

巴基拉尼发展出一种被称为“原子论”或“偶因论”的理论，试图为穆斯林的信仰主张——即除真主（安拉）之外，别无神明、别无现实、别无确定性——寻找形而上学的解释。他声称，世间万物都绝对依赖于真主的直接关注。整个宇宙被简化为无数个独立的原子：时间和空间是不连续的，没有任何事物拥有其自身的特定身份。巴基拉尼将现象宇宙还原为虚无，其程度与阿塔纳修斯如出一辙。唯有真主拥有现实，也只有他才能将我们从虚无中拯救出来。他维系着宇宙，并创造了万物。每时每刻。没有任何自然法则可以解释宇宙的存续。尽管其他穆斯林在科学领域取得了巨大成功，但阿什阿里主义从根本上与自然科学相悖，然而它却具有宗教意义。它是一种形而上学的尝试，旨在解释上帝在日常生活的方方面面都存在，并提醒人们信仰并不依赖于普通的逻辑。如果将其作为一种修行方法而非对现实的客观描述，它可以帮助穆斯林培养《古兰经》所规定的敬畏上帝的意识。它的弱点在于忽略了与之相反的科学证据，以及对一种本质上难以捉摸的宗教态度的过于字面的解读。它可能会导致穆斯林看待上帝的方式与看待其他事物的方式脱节。穆尔太齐赖派和阿什阿里派都曾以不同的方式尝试将对上帝的宗教体验与普通的理性思维联系起来。这一点至关重要。穆斯林试图探究是否有可能像讨论其他事物一样谈论上帝。我们已经看到，希腊人权衡利弊后认为并非如此，沉默才是唯一恰当的神学形式。最终，大多数穆斯林也会得出同样的结论。

Al-Baqillani developed a theory known as “atomism” or “occasionalism” which attempted to find a metaphysical rationale for the Muslim profession of faith: that there was no god, no reality or certainty but al-Lah. He claimed that everything in the world is absolutely dependent upon God’s direct attention. The whole universe was reduced to innumerable individual atoms: time and space were discontinuous and nothing had a specific identity of its own. The phenomenal universe was reduced to nothingness by al-Baqillani as radically as it had been by Athanasius. God alone had reality, and only he could redeem us from nothingness. He sustained the universe and summoned his creation into existence at every second. There were no natural laws that explained the survival of the cosmos. Although other Muslims were applying themselves to science with great success, Asharism was fundamentally antagonistic to the natural sciences, yet it had a religious relevance. It was a metaphysical attempt to explain the presence of God in every detail of daily life and a reminder that faith did not depend upon ordinary logic. If used as a discipline rather than a factual account of reality it could help Muslims to develop that God-consciousness prescribed by the Koran. Its weakness lay in the exclusion of the scientific evidence to the contrary and its overliteral interpretation of an essentially elusive religious attitude. It could effect a dislocation between the way a Muslim viewed God and the way he regarded other matters. Both the Mutazilis and the Asharites had attempted, in different ways, to connect the religious experience of God with ordinary rational thought. This was important. Muslims were trying to find out whether it was possible to talk about God as we discuss other matters. We have seen that the Greeks had decided on balance that it was not and that silence was the only appropriate form of theology. Ultimately most Muslims would come to the same conclusion.

穆罕默德及其同伴所处的社会远比巴基拉尼的社会原始得多。伊斯兰帝国扩张至文明世界后，穆斯林不得不面对更为复杂的、更具理性的关于上帝和世界的认知方式。穆罕默德本能地重温了古希伯来人与神相遇的诸多体验，而后世也不得不面对基督教教会曾遭遇的一些问题。尽管《古兰经》谴责基督教对基督的神化，一些人甚至诉诸道成肉身神学。伊斯兰教的探索表明，超越而又人格化的上帝概念往往会引发类似的问题，并最终导向类似的解决方案。

Muhammad and his companions had belonged to a far more primitive society than that of al-Baqillani. The Islamic empire had spread to the civilized world, and the Muslims had to confront more intellectually sophisticated ways of regarding God and the world. Muhammad had instinctively relived much in the old Hebrew encounter with the divine, and later generations also had to live through some of the problems encountered by the Christian churches. Some had even resorted to an incarnational theology, despite the Koran’s condemnation of the Christian deification of Christ. The Islamic venture shows that the notion of a transcendent yet personal God tends to bring up the same kind of problems and lead to the same type of solutions.

卡拉姆的实验表明，尽管可以用理性方法证明“上帝”在理性上是不可理解的，但这会让一些穆斯林感到不安。卡拉姆在西方基督教中的地位从未达到神学的高度。支持穆尔太齐赖派的阿拔斯王朝哈里发发现，他们无法将穆尔太齐赖派的教义强加给信徒，因为信徒们并不“接受”。理性主义在整个中世纪时期持续影响着后来的思想家，但它始终是一种少数人的追求，大多数穆斯林开始对整个理性主义体系抱有怀疑。与基督教和犹太教一样，伊斯兰教也源于闪米特人的经验，但在中东的希腊中心地带与希腊理性主义发生了冲突。其他穆斯林也在尝试一种更为……伊斯兰教的上帝形象被更彻底地希腊化，并为三大一神教引入了新的哲学元素。犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教这三大信仰最终对哲学的有效性及其与上帝奥秘的关联性得出了不同但意义深远的结论。

The experiment of Kalam showed that though it was possible to use rational methods to show that “God” was rationally incomprehensible, this would make some Muslims uneasy. Kalam never became as important as theology in Western Christianity. The Abbasid caliphs who had supported the Mutazilah found that they could not impose its doctrines on the faithful because they did not “take.” Rationalism continued to influence future thinkers throughout the medieval period, but it remained a minority pursuit, and most Muslims came to distrust the whole enterprise. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam had emerged from a Semitic experience but had collided with the Greek rationalism in the Hellenic centers of the Middle East. Other Muslims were attempting an even more radical Hellenization of the Islamic God and introduced a new philosophical element into the three monotheistic religions. The three faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam would come to different but highly significant conclusions about the validity of philosophy and its relevance to the mystery of God.

6

哲人之神

6

The God of the Philosophers

D九世纪，阿拉伯人接触到了希腊的科学和哲学，由此引发了一场文化繁荣。从欧洲的角度来看，这场繁荣可以被视为文艺复兴和启蒙运动的结合体。一支翻译团队，其中大多数是聂斯托利派基督徒，将希腊文献翻译成阿拉伯语，并取得了卓越的成就。阿拉伯穆斯林开始在天文学、炼金术、医学和数学领域进行深入研究，并取得了巨大的成功。在九世纪和十世纪，阿拔斯王朝在科学发现方面取得的成就超过了历史上任何时期。一种新型的穆斯林应运而生，他们致力于一种被称为“法尔萨法”（Falsafah）的理想。这个词通常被翻译为“哲学”，但它的含义更为广泛和丰富：如同十八世纪的法国哲学家一样，法尔萨法信徒希望按照他们认为支配宇宙的法则理性地生活，而这些法则可以在现实的各个层面被感知。起初，他们专注于自然科学，但随后不可避免地转向希腊形而上学，并决心将其原理应用于伊斯兰教。他们认为希腊哲学家的上帝与真主（安拉）是同一的。希腊基督徒也曾对希腊文化抱有亲近之感，但他们认为希腊的上帝必须被圣经中更为矛盾的上帝所修正：最终，正如我们将看到的，他们背弃了自己的哲学传统，认为理性和逻辑对研究上帝几乎无济于事。然而，费拉苏夫派却得出了截然相反的结论：他们认为理性主义代表了最先进的宗教形式，并发展出一种比圣经启示的上帝更高的上帝观念。

DURING THE NINTH CENTURY, the Arabs came into contact with Greek science and philosophy, and the result was a cultural florescence which, in European terms, can be seen as a cross between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. A team of translators, most of whom were Nestorian Christians, made Greek texts available in Arabic and did a brilliant job. Arab Muslims now studied astronomy, alchemy, medicine and mathematics with such success that, during the ninth and tenth centuries, more scientific discoveries had been achieved in the Abbasid empire than in any previous period of history. A new type of Muslim emerged, dedicated to the ideal that he called Falsafah. This is usually translated “philosophy” but has a broader, richer meaning: like the French philosophes of the eighteenth century, the Faylasufs wanted to live rationally in accordance with the laws that they believed governed the cosmos, which could be discerned at every level of reality. At first, they concentrated on natural science, but then, inevitably, they turned to Greek metaphysics and determined to apply its principles to Islam. They believed that the God of the Greek philosophers was identical with al-Lah. Greek Christians had also felt an affinity with Hellenism but had decided that the God of the Greeks must be modified by the more paradoxical God of the Bible: eventually, as we shall see, they turned their backs on their own philosophical tradition in the belief that reason and logic had little to contribute to the study of God. The Faylasufs, however, came to the opposite conclusion: they believed that rationalism represented the most advanced form of religion and had evolved a higher notion of God than the revealed God of scripture.

今天，我们通常认为科学和哲学与宗教对立，但费拉苏夫家族的成员大多是虔诚的信徒，他们自视为先知的忠实子嗣。作为虔诚的穆斯林，他们具有政治意识，鄙视宫廷的奢靡生活，并希望按照理性的指引改革社会。他们的尝试意义重大：由于他们的科学和哲学研究深受希腊思想的影响，因此必须找到信仰与这种更为理性、客观的视角之间的联系。将上帝归入一个独立的知识范畴，并将信仰与其他人类关切割裂开来，是非常有害的。费拉苏夫家族无意废除宗教，而是希望清除他们认为原始和狭隘的宗教成分。他们毫不怀疑上帝的存在——事实上，他们认为上帝的存在是不言而喻的——但他们认为有必要用逻辑来证明这一点，以表明真主与他们的理性主义理想相符。

Today, we generally see science and philosophy as antagonistic to religion, but the Faylasufs were usually devout men and saw themselves as loyal sons of the Prophet. As good Muslims, they were politically aware, despised the luxury of the court and wanted to reform their society according to the dictates of reason. Their venture was important: since their scientific and philosophic studies were dominated by Greek thought, it was imperative to find a link between their faith and this more rationalistic, objective outlook. It can be most unhealthy to relegate God to a separate intellectual category and to see faith in isolation from other human concerns. The Faylasufs had no intention of abolishing religion, but wanted to purify it of what they regarded as primitive and parochial elements. They had no doubt that God existed—indeed they regarded his existence as self-evident—but felt that it was important to prove this logically in order to show that al-Lah was compatible with their rationalist ideal.

然而，问题也随之而来。我们已经看到，希腊哲学家的上帝与启示中的上帝截然不同：亚里士多德或普罗提诺的至高神是永恒的、无情的；祂不关注世俗事件，不在历史中显现自身，祂没有创造世界，也不会在末日审判世界。事实上，历史——一神论信仰的主要神显——被亚里士多德斥为不如哲学。它没有开始、过程或结束，因为宇宙永恒地源于上帝。法拉萨夫派想要超越历史——历史不过是一种幻象——去瞥见永恒不变的神圣理想世界。尽管强调理性，法拉萨夫派仍然要求建立一种独特的信仰。相信宇宙——一个混乱和痛苦似乎比秩序更显明显的宇宙——实际上是由理性原则支配的，这需要极大的勇气。在周遭世界频发的灾难和失败事件中，他们也必须培养一种对终极意义的理解。法尔萨法（Falsafah）中蕴含着一种高贵的品质，一种对客观性和永恒视野的追求。他们渴望一种普世的宗教，这种宗教不局限于上帝的某种特定化身，也不植根于特定的时间和地点；他们相信，将《古兰经》的启示翻译成历代以来由各个文化中最杰出、最高尚的思想家们发展出的更为先进的语言，是他们的职责所在。法伊拉苏夫派（Faylasufs）并不将上帝视为一个谜，而是认为上帝本身就是理性。

There were problems, however. We have seen that the God of the Greek philosophers was very different from the God of revelation: the Supreme Deity of Aristotle or Plotinus was timeless and impassible; he took no notice of mundane events, did not reveal himself in history, had not created the world and would not judge it at the end of time. Indeed history, the major theophany of the monotheistic faiths, had been dismissed by Aristotle as inferior to philosophy. It had no beginning, middle or end, since the cosmos emanated eternally from God. The Faylasufs wanted to get beyond history, which was a mere illusion, to glimpse the changeless, ideal world of the divine. Despite the emphasis on rationality, Falsafah demanded a faith of its own. It took great courage to believe that the cosmos, where chaos and pain seemed more in evidence than a purposeful order, was really ruled by the principle of reason. They too had to cultivate a sense of an ultimate meaning amid the frequently disastrous and botched events of the world around them. There was a nobility in Falsafah, a search for objectivity and a timeless vision. They wanted a universal religion, which was not limited to a particular manifestation of God or rooted in a definite time and place; they believed that it was their duty to translate the revelation of the Koran into the more advanced idiom developed through the ages by the best and noblest minds in all cultures. Instead of seeing God as a mystery, the Faylasufs believed that he was reason itself.

在今天看来，这种对完全理性宇宙的信仰显得天真，因为我们自身的科学发现早已揭示了亚里士多德证明上帝存在的论证的不足。这种观点是不可能的。对于九、十世纪的人来说，这或许有些不可思议，但法尔萨法的经历与我们当今的宗教困境息息相关。阿拔斯王朝时期的科学革命，其参与者所经历的远不止是获取新信息。如同我们今天一样，科学发现要求人们培养一种不同的思维方式，这改变了法伊拉苏夫家族看待世界的方式。科学要求人们坚信万物皆有理性解释；它也需要想象力和勇气，这与宗教的创造力颇为相似。如同先知或神秘主义者，科学家也必须直面黑暗且变幻莫测的非受造现实领域。这不可避免地影响了法伊拉苏夫家族对上帝的认知，促使他们修正甚至放弃同时代人的旧有信仰。同样，我们今天的科学视野也使许多人无法接受许多传统的有神论。固守旧有的神学不仅是意志薄弱的表现，更可能导致人格完整性的严重丧失。费拉苏夫夫妇试图将他们的新见解与主流伊斯兰信仰相结合，并提出了一些受希腊启发、关于上帝的革命性观点。然而，他们理性神论的最终失败，却为我们揭示了宗教真理的本质，具有重要的启示意义。

Such faith in a wholly rational universe seems naive to us today, since our own scientific discoveries have long since revealed the inadequacy of Aristotle’s proofs for the existence of God. This perspective was imposible for anybody in the ninth and tenth centuries, but the experience of Falsafah is relevant to our current religious predicament. The scientific revolution of the Abbasid period involved its participants in more than an acquisition of new information. As in our own day, scientific discoveries demanded the cultivation of a different mentality that transformed the way the Faylasufs viewed the world. Science demands the fundamental belief that there is a rational explanation for everything; it also requires an imagination and courage which are not dissimilar to religious creativity. Like the prophet or the mystic, the scientist also forces himself to confront the dark and unpredictable realm of uncreated reality. Inevitably this affected the Faylasufs’ perception of God and made them revise and even abandon the older beliefs of their contemporaries. In the same way, the scientific vision of our own day has made much classic theism impossible for many people. To cling to the old theology is not only a failure of nerve but could involve a damaging loss of integrity. The Faylasufs attempted to wed their new insights with mainstream Islamic faith and came up with some revolutionary Greek-inspired ideas about God. Yet the ultimate failure of their rational deity has something important to tell us about the nature of religious truth.

费拉苏夫派试图比以往任何一神论者都更彻底地融合希腊哲学和宗教。穆塔齐利派和阿什阿里派都曾试图在启示和自然理性之间架起桥梁，但他们都先强调启示之神的存在。卡拉姆学派基于传统的一神论历史观，认为历史是神显；他们认为具体、特殊的事件至关重要，因为它们提供了我们唯一拥有的确定性。事实上，阿什阿里派怀疑是否存在普遍规律和永恒原则。尽管这种原子论具有宗教和想象价值，但它显然与科学精神格格不入，无法满足费拉苏夫派的需求。他们的哲学（Falsafah）否定历史、具体和特殊性，却培养了一种对普遍规律的敬畏，而这种敬畏正是阿什阿里派所摒弃的。他们认为，上帝应该在逻辑论证中被发现，而不是在特定时刻对个别男女的启示中被发现。这种对客观、普遍真理的追求构成了他们科学研究的特征，并影响了他们体验终极实在的方式。如果上帝对每个人而言并非完全相同（尽管不可避免地会受到文化差异的影响），那么它就无法为“生命的终极意义是什么？”这一根本的宗教问题提供令人满意的答案。你不能一边在实验室里寻求具有普遍适用性的科学答案，一边又向一位越来越被信徒视为唯一拥有者的上帝祈祷。穆斯林群体。然而，对《古兰经》的研究表明，穆罕默德本人具有普世视野，并坚持认为所有正统宗教都源自真主。费拉苏夫派并不认为有必要抛弃《古兰经》。相反，他们试图阐明二者之间的关系：两者都是通往真主的有效途径，并能满足个人的需求。他们认为启示与科学、理性主义与信仰之间并无根本矛盾。相反，他们发展出一种被称为先知哲学的理论。他们想要找到所有历史宗教的核心真理，这些宗教自古以来就一直在试图定义同一位真主的本质。

The Faylasufs were attempting a more thoroughgoing merging of Greek philosophy and religion than any previous monotheists. The Mutazilis and the Asharites had both tried to build a bridge between revelation and natural reason but, with them, the God of revelation had come first. Kalam was based on the traditionally monotheistic view of history as a theophany; it argued that concrete, particular events were crucial because they provided the only certainty we had. Indeed, the Asharis doubted that there were general laws and timeless principles. Though this atomism had a religious and imaginative value, it was clearly alien to the scientific spirit and could not satisfy the Faylasufs. Their Falsafah discounted history, the concrete and the particular but cultivated a reverence for the general laws that the Asharis rejected. Their God was to be discovered in logical arguments, not in particular revelations at various moments in time to individual men and women. This search for objective, generalized truth characterized their scientific studies and conditioned the way they experienced the ultimate reality. A God who was not the same for everybody, give or take inevitable cultural coloration, could not provide a satisfactory solution to the fundamental religious question: “What is the ultimate meaning of life?” You could not seek scientific solutions that had a universal application in the laboratory and pray to a God who was increasingly regarded by the faithful as the sole possession of the Muslims. Yet the study of the Koran revealed that Muhammad himself had had a universal vision and had insisted that all rightly guided religions came from God. The Faylasufs did not feel that there was any need to jettison the Koran. Instead they tried to show the relationship between the two: both were valid paths to God, suited to the needs of individuals. They saw no fundamental contradiction between revelation and science, rationalism and faith. Instead, they evolved what has been called a prophetic philosophy. They wanted to find the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of all the various historical religions, which, since the dawn of history, had been trying to define the reality of the same God.

法尔萨法（Falsafah）的思想深受希腊科学和形而上学的影响，但并非盲目地依赖于希腊化。在中东殖民地，希腊人通常遵循一套标准的课程体系，因此，尽管希腊化哲学各有侧重，但每个学生都必须按特定顺序阅读一系列文本。这造就了一定程度的统一性和连贯性。然而，法伊拉苏夫（Faylasuf）家族并没有遵循这套课程体系，而是根据当时可获得的文本进行阅读。这必然会开拓新的视角。除了自身独特的伊斯兰和阿拉伯见解之外，他们的思想也受到了波斯、印度和诺斯替主义的影响。

Falsafah had been inspired by the encounter with Greek science and metaphysics but was not slavishly dependent upon Hellenism. In their Middle Eastern colonies, the Greeks had tended to follow a standard curriculum, so that though there were different emphases in Hellenistic philosophy, each student was expected to read a set of texts in a particular order. This had led to a degree of unity and coherence. However, the Faylasufs did not observe this curriculum, but read the texts as they became available. This inevitably opened up new perspectives. Besides their own distinctively Islamic and Arab insights, their thinking was also affected by Persian, Indian and Gnostic influence.

因此，雅库布·伊本·伊沙克·金迪（约卒于公元870年）是第一位将理性方法应用于《古兰经》的穆斯林，他与穆尔太齐赖派关系密切，并在几个重要问题上与亚里士多德存在分歧。他曾在巴士拉接受教育，后定居巴格达，并受到哈里发马蒙的庇护。他的著作颇丰，影响深远，涵盖数学、科学和哲学等领域。但他最关注的还是宗教。受穆尔太齐赖派的影响，他认为哲学只是启示的婢女：先知的灵感知识始终超越了哲学家们仅凭人性的洞见。大多数后来的费拉苏夫派学者并不认同这种观点。然而，金迪也渴望在其他宗教传统中探寻真理。在他看来，真理只有一个，而哲学家的职责就是在几个世纪以来真理所呈现的各种文化或语言外衣中寻找它。

Thus Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. ca. 870), the first Muslim to apply the rational method to the Koran, was closely associated with the Mutazilis and disagreed with Aristotle on several major issues. He had been educated at Basra but settled in Baghdad, where he enjoyed the patronage of the Caliph al-Mamun. His output and influence were immense, including mathematics, science and philosophy. But his chief concern was religion. With his Mutazili background, he could only see philosophy as the handmaid of revelation: the inspired knowledge of the prophets had always transcended the merely human insights of the philosophers. Most later Faylasufs would not share this perspective. Al-Kindi was also anxious to seek out the truth in other religious traditions, however. Truth was one, and it was the task of the philosopher to search for it in whatever cultural or linguistic garments it had assumed over the centuries.

在这一点上，肯迪的观点与《古兰经》一致。但他更进一步，不仅参考了先知的著作，还借鉴了希腊哲学家的思想。他运用亚里士多德关于第一推动者存在的论证。他认为，在一个理性的世界里，万物皆有其因。因此，必然存在一个不动的推动者来启动万物运转。这个第一原则就是存在本身，永恒不变、完美无缺、不可毁灭。然而，在得出这一结论之后，肯迪却背离了亚里士多德的观点，坚持《古兰经》中“无中生有”的创造论。行动可以被定义为从无到有地创造事物。肯迪认为，这是上帝的特权。只有上帝才能真正地以这种方式行动，也正是他才是我们周围世界一切活动的真正原因。

Here al-Kindi was in line with the Koran. But he went further, since he did not confine himself to the prophets but also turned to the Greek philosophers. He used Aristotle’s arguments for the existence of a Prime Mover. In a rational world, he argued, everything had a cause. There must, therefore, be an Unmoved Mover to start the ball rolling. This First Principle was Being itself, unchangeable, perfect and indestructible. But having reached this conclusion, al-Kindi departed from Aristotle by adhering to the Koranic doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Action can be defined as the bringing of something out of nothing. This, al-Kindi maintained, was God’s prerogative. He is the only Being who can truly act in this sense, and it is he who is the real cause of all the activity that we see in the world around us.

哲学家们最终否定了无中生有的创造论，因此，肯迪不能被真正称为一位法拉苏夫（Faylasuf，伊斯兰教哲学家）。但他却是伊斯兰世界尝试调和宗教真理与系统形而上学的先驱。他的后继者们则更为激进。例如，被誉为穆斯林历史上最伟大的非传统主义者的阿布·伯克尔·穆罕默德·伊本·扎卡里亚·拉齐（卒于约公元930年），他否定了亚里士多德的形而上学，并像诺斯替教徒一样，认为创造是造物主（demiurge）的杰作：物质不可能源于一个完全精神性的神。他还否定了亚里士多德关于第一推动者（First Moment）的解释，以及《古兰经》中关于启示和预言的教义。他认为只有理性和哲学才能拯救我们。因此，拉齐并非真正的一神论者：他或许是第一个认为上帝的概念与科学观不相容的自由思想家。他是一位才华横溢的医生，也是一位和蔼慷慨的人，多年来一直担任家乡伊朗雷伊镇医院的院长。大多数法拉苏夫派信徒并没有将理性主义推向如此极端。在与一位较为传统的穆斯林辩论中，他认为真正的法拉苏夫派信徒不能依赖既定的传统，而必须独立思考，因为只有理性才能引领我们走向真理。依赖启示教义是徒劳的，因为不同的宗教之间无法达成共识。谁又能分辨出哪个才是正确的呢？但他的对手——令人费解的是，他也被称为拉齐二世^——提出了一个重要的观点。他问道：那么普通民众呢？他们中的大多数人根本不具备哲学思考的能力：难道他们就因此迷失方向，注定要陷入谬误和困惑吗？法拉苏夫派在伊斯兰教中始终是一个少数派的原因之一就是它的精英主义。它必然只吸引那些拥有一定智商的人，因此与当时开始在穆斯林社会中兴起的平等精神背道而驰。

Falsafah came to reject creation ex nihilo, so al-Kindi cannot really be described as a true Faylasuf. But he was a pioneer in the Islamic attempt to harmonize religious truth with systematic metaphysics. His successors were more radical. Thus Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakaria ar-Razi (d. ca. 930), who has been described as the greatest nonconformist in Muslim history, rejected Aristotle’s metaphysics and, like the Gnostics, saw the creation as the work of a demiurge: matter could not have proceeded from a wholly spiritual God. He also rejected the Aristotelian solution of a Prime Mover, as well as the Koranic doctrines of revelation and prophecy. Only reason and philosophy could save us. Ar-Razi was not really a monotheist, therefore: he was perhaps the first freethinker to find the concept of God incompatible with a scientific outlook. He was a brilliant physician and a kindly, generous man, who worked for years as the head of the hospital of his native Rayy in Iran. Most Faylasufs did not take their rationalism to such an extreme. In a debate with a more conventional Muslim, he argued that no true Faylasuf could rely on an established tradition, but had to think things through for himself, since reason alone could lead us to truth. Reliance on revealed doctrines was useless because the religions could not agree. How could anybody tell which one was correct? But his opponent—who, rather confusingly, was also called ar-Razi²—made an important point. What about the common people? he asked. Most of them were quite incapable of philosophic thought: were they therefore lost, doomed to error and confusion? One of the reasons that Falsafah remained a minority sect in Islam was its elitism. It necessarily only appealed to those with a certain IQ and was thus against the egalitarian spirit that was beginning to characterize Muslim society.

土耳其学者法伊拉苏夫·阿布·纳斯尔·法拉比（卒于980年）探讨了未受过教育的大众的问题，他们不具备哲学能力。理性主义。他可被视为正统哲学（Falsafah）的奠基人，并展现了这一穆斯林理想的普世魅力。法拉比堪称一位文艺复兴式的人物；他不仅是一位医生，还是一位音乐家和神秘主义者。在他的《美德之城居民的意见》一书中，他也展现了穆斯林精神的核心——社会和政治关怀。柏拉图在《理想国》中论证，一个美好的社会必须由一位哲学家领导，这位哲学家必须按照理性原则进行统治，并且能够将这些原则传达给普通民众。法拉比认为，先知穆罕默德正是柏拉图所设想的那种统治者。他以一种富有想象力的方式表达了永恒的真理，使人们能够理解，因此伊斯兰教非常适合构建柏拉图的理想社会。什叶派或许是最适合实现这一目标的伊斯兰教派别，因为他们崇尚智慧的伊玛目。尽管法拉比是一位虔诚的苏菲派信徒，但他却将启示视为一个完全自然的过程。希腊哲学家眼中的上帝超脱于人类事务之外，不可能像传统启示教义所暗示的那样“与人类对话”并干预世俗事件。但这并不意味着上帝与法拉比的主要关注点无关。上帝是他哲学的核心，他的论著也以对上帝的探讨开篇。然而，他所理解的上帝是亚里士多德和普罗提诺笔下的上帝：祂是万物之始。一位在德尼·阿雷奥帕吉特的神秘主义哲学熏陶下成长起来的希腊基督徒，会反对这样一种理论：上帝仅仅是另一个存在，尽管其本质更为优越。但法拉比始终与亚里士多德保持着密切的联系。他不相信上帝“突然”决定创造世界。那样就意味着永恒不变的上帝发生了不合时宜的变化。

The Turkish Faylasuf Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 980) dealt with the problem of the uneducated masses, who were not capable of philosophic rationalism. He can be regarded as the founder of authentic Falsafah and showed the attractive universality of this Muslim ideal. Al-Farabi was what we would call a Renaissance Man; he was not only a physician but also a musician and a mystic. In his Opinions of the Inhabitants of a Virtuous City, he also demonstrated the social and political concern that were central to Muslim spirituality. In the Republic, Plato had argued that a good society must be led by a philosopher who ruled according to rational principles, which he was able to put across to the ordinary people. Al-Farabi maintained that the Prophet Muhammad had been exactly the kind of ruler that Plato had envisaged. He had expressed the timeless truths in an imaginative form that the people could understand, so Islam was ideally suited to create Plato’s ideal society. The Shiah was perhaps the form of Islam best suited to carry out this project, because of its cult of the wise Imam. Even though he was a practicing Sufi, al-Farabi saw revelation as a wholly natural process. The God of the Greek philosophers, who was remote from human concerns, could not possibly “talk to” human beings and interfere in mundane events, as the traditional doctrine of revelation implied. That did not mean that God was remote from al-Farabi’s main concerns, however. God was central to his philosophy, and his treatise began with a discussion of God. This was the God of Aristotle and Plotinus, however: he was the First of all beings. A Greek Christian brought up on the mystical philosophy of Denys the Areopagite would have objected to a theory that simply made God another being, albeit of a superior nature. But al-Farabi stayed close to Aristotle. He did not believe that God had “suddenly” decided to create the world. That would have involved the eternal and static God in unseemly change.

与希腊人一样，法拉比认为存在之链永恒地从“一”出发，依次流溢出十个不同的“智慧体”，每个智慧体都生成托勒密五大天球之一：外层天体、恒星天球、土星天球、木星天球、火星天球、太阳天球、金星天球、水星天球和月亮天球。当我们进入尘世世界后，便会意识到存在着一个反向演化的层级，它从无生命物质开始，经过植物和动物，最终达到人类的顶峰。人类的灵魂和智慧与神圣的理性相连，而他们的身体则来自大地。通过柏拉图和普罗提诺所描述的净化过程，人类可以摆脱尘世的束缚，回归上帝——他们自然的家园。

Like the Greeks, al-Farabi saw the chain of being proceeding eternally from the One in ten successive emanations or “intellects,” each of which generates one of the Ptolemaic spheres: the outer heavens, the sphere of the fixed stars, the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Once we arrive in our own sublunary world, we become aware of a hierarchy of being that evolves in the opposite direction, beginning with inanimate matter, progressing through plants and animals to culminate in humanity, whose soul and intellect partake of the divine Reason, while his body comes from the earth. By the process of purification, described by Plato and Plotinus, human beings can cast off their earthly fetters and return to God, their natural home.

这与《古兰经》对现实的看法存在明显的差异，但法拉比认为哲学是理解真理的更高级途径，先知们以诗意和隐喻的方式表达了这些真理，目的是为了……吸引民众。哲学并非人人都能接受。到了十世纪中叶，伊斯兰教开始融入神秘主义元素。哲学便是其中之一。苏菲主义和什叶派对伊斯兰教的诠释也与乌里玛（即那些只遵循圣典和《古兰经》的教士）有所不同。他们之所以将教义秘而不宣，并非为了排斥民众，而是因为哲学家、苏菲派和什叶派都明白，他们那些更具冒险性和创造性的伊斯兰教版本很容易被误解。对哲学教义、苏菲主义神话或什叶派伊玛目学的字面或简单化解读，可能会让那些缺乏能力、训练或性情去理解更具象征性、理性或想象力的终极真理的人感到困惑。在这些秘传教派中，入会者通过特殊的精神和心灵修炼，接受精心准备以理解这些深奥的观念。我们已经看到，希腊基督徒也发展出类似的观念，即区分教条（dogma）和宣讲（kerygma）。西方没有发展出秘传传统，而是坚持对宗教进行宣讲式的诠释，并认为这种诠释对所有人都是一样的。西方基督徒并没有允许所谓的“异端”隐居，而是对他们进行迫害，试图消灭所有不墨守成规的人。在伊斯兰教中，秘传思想家通常安然离世。

There were obvious differences from the Koranic vision of reality, but al-Farabi saw philosophy as a superior way of understanding truths which the prophets had expressed in a poetic, metaphorical way, in order to appeal to the people. Falsafah was not for everybody. By the middle of the tenth century, an esoteric element was beginning to enter Islam. Falsafah was one such esoteric discipline. Sufism and Shiism also interpreted Islam differently from the ulema, the clerics who adhered solely to the Holy Law and the Koran. Again, they kept their doctrines secret not because they wanted to exclude the populace but because Faylasufs, Sufis and Shiis all understood that their more adventurous and inventive versions of Islam could easily be misunderstood. A literal or simplistic interpretation of the doctrines of Falsafah, the myths of Sufism or the. Imamology of the Shiah could confuse people who had not the capacity, training or temperament for a more symbolic, rationalistic or imaginative approach to ultimate truth. In these esoteric sects, initiates were carefully prepared for the reception of these difficult notions, by means of special disciplines of mind and heart. We have seen that Greek Christians had developed a similar notion, in the distinction between dogma and kerygma. The West did not develop an esoteric tradition but adhered to the kerygmatic interpretation of religion, which was supposed to be the same for everybody. Instead of allowing their so-called deviants to go private, Western Christians simply persecuted them and attempted to wipe out nonconformists. In Islamdom, esoteric thinkers usually died in their beds.

法拉比的流溢论被费拉苏夫派普遍接受。正如我们将看到的，神秘主义者也认为流溢论比无中生有的创世论更易于理解。穆斯林苏菲派和犹太卡巴拉学者非但没有将哲学和理性视为与宗教相悖，反而常常发现费拉苏夫派的洞见启发了他们更具想象力的宗教模式。这一点在什叶派中尤为明显。尽管什叶派在伊斯兰教中仍属于少数派，但十世纪被称为什叶派世纪，因为什叶派成功地在帝国各地占据了重要的政治职位。什叶派最成功的举措是于909年在突尼斯建立哈里发国，与巴格达的逊尼派哈里发国对抗。这是伊斯玛仪派的成就，该派被称为“法蒂玛派”或“七伊玛目派”，以区别于人数更多的“十二伊玛目派”什叶派，后者接受十二位伊玛目的权威。伊斯玛仪派在圣洁的第六任伊玛目贾法尔·伊本·萨迪克于公元765年去世后脱离了十二伊玛目派。贾法尔曾指定其子伊斯玛仪为继承人，但伊斯玛仪早逝，十二伊玛目派转而接受其弟穆萨的统治。然而，伊斯玛仪派始终忠于伊斯玛仪，并认为其血脉已随他断绝。他们的北非哈里发国势力极其强大：公元973年，他们将首都迁至开罗。现代开罗的所在地，他们在那里建造了伟大的爱资哈尔清真寺。

Al-Farabi’s doctrine of emanation became generally accepted by the Faylasufs. Mystics, as we shall see, also found the notion of emanation more sympathetic than the doctrine of the creation ex nihilo. Far from seeing philosophy and reason as inimical to religion, Muslim Sufis and Jewish Kabbalists often found that the insights of the Faylasufs were an inspiration to their more imaginative mode of religion. This was particularly evident in the Shiah. Although they remained a minority form of Islam, the tenth century is known as the Shii century since Shiis managed to establish themselves in leading political posts throughout the empire. The most successful of these Shii ventures was the establishment of a caliphate in Tunis in 909 in opposition to the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad. This was the achievement of the Ismaili sect, known as “Fatimids” or “Seveners” to distinguish them from the more numerous “Twelver” Shiis, who accepted the authority of twelve Imams. The Ismailis broke away from the Twelvers after the death of Jafar ibn Sadiq, the saintly Sixth Imam, in 765. Jafar had designated his son Ismail as his successor, but when Ismail died young the Twelvers accepted the authority of his brother Musa. The Ismailis, however, remained true to Ismail and believed that the line had ended with him. Their North African caliphate became extremely powerful: in 973 they moved their capital to al-Qahirah, the site of modern Cairo, where they built the great mosque of al-Azhar.

然而，对伊玛目的崇敬并非仅仅出于政治热情。正如我们所见，什叶派逐渐相信，他们的伊玛目以某种神秘的方式体现了真主在人间的临在。他们发展出一种独特的秘传虔诚，这种虔诚依赖于对《古兰经》的象征性解读。他们认为，穆罕默德曾将一种秘密知识传授给他的堂弟兼女婿阿里·伊本·阿比·塔利卜，而这种知识又通过指定的伊玛目传承下来，这些伊玛目都是穆罕默德的直系后裔。每一位伊玛目都体现了“穆罕默德之光”（al-nur al-Muhammad），即使穆罕默德能够完全臣服于真主的先知精神。先知和伊玛目都不是神，但他们对真主如此全然敞开，以至于可以说真主在他们心中比在普通人心中更加完整地存在。聂斯托利派对耶稣也持有类似的观点。与聂斯托利派一样，什叶派也视他们的伊玛目为神圣的“圣殿”或“宝库”，其中蕴藏着启迪人心的神圣知识。这种知识并非仅仅是秘密信息，而是转化和内在转变的途径。在达伊（精神导师）的指导下，门徒被梦境般清晰的景象唤醒，摆脱了懒惰和麻木。这种转变使他能够理解《古兰经》的深奥诠释。这种原始的体验是一种觉醒，正如我们在十世纪伊斯玛仪派哲学家纳西里·胡斯鲁的这首诗中所见，诗中描述了改变他一生的伊玛目景象：

The veneration of the Imams was no mere political enthusiasm, however. As we have seen, Shiis had come to believe that their Imams embodied God’s presence on earth in some mysterious way. They had evolved an esoteric piety of their own which depended upon a symbolic reading of the Koran. It was held that Muhammad had imparted a secret knowledge to his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib and that this ilm had been passed down the line of designated Imams, who were his direct descendants. Each of the Imams embodied the “Light of Muhammad” (al-nur al-Muhammad), the prophetic spirit which had enabled Muhammad to surrender perfectly to God. Neither the Prophet nor the Imams were divine, but they had been so totally open to God that he could be said to dwell within them in a more complete way than he dwelt in more ordinary mortals. The Nestorians had held a similar view of Jesus. Like the Nestorians, Shiis saw their Imams as “temples” or “treasuries” of the divine, brimful of that enlightening divine knowledge. This ilm was not simply secret information but a means of transformation and inner conversion. Under the guidance of his da’i (spiritual director), the disciple was roused from sloth and insensitivity by a vision of dreamlike clarity. This so transformed him that he was able to understand the esoteric interpretation of the Koran. This primal experience was an act of awakening, as we see in this poem by Nasiri al-Khusraw, a tenth-century Ismaili philosopher, which describes the vision of the Imam which changed his life:

正如基督在塔博尔山上代表了希腊东正教基督徒所理解的神化的人性，正如佛陀体现了全人类皆可获得的觉悟，伊玛目的人性也因其对上帝的完全接纳而发生了转变。

As Christ on Mount Tabor represented deified humanity to Greek Orthodox Christians and as the Buddha embodied that enlightenment that is possible for all mankind, so too had the human nature of the Imam been transfigured by his total receptivity to God.

伊斯玛仪派担心费拉苏夫派过于注重宗教的外在和理性层面，而忽略了其精神内核。例如，他们曾反对自由思想家拉齐。但他们也发展了自己的哲学和科学，这些并非目的本身，而是作为一种精神修行，帮助他们领悟《古兰经》的内在含义（batin）。对科学和数学抽象概念的思考净化了他们的心灵，使他们摆脱了感官意象的束缚，并从日常意识的局限中解脱出来。与我们运用科学来获得对外部现实的精确和字面理解不同，伊斯玛仪派运用科学来发展他们的想象力。他们转向伊朗古老的琐罗亚斯德教神话，将其与一些新柏拉图主义思想融合，从而发展出一种新的救赎史观。人们或许还记得，在较为传统的社会中，人们相信他们在尘世的经历会重现天界发生的事件：柏拉图的理念论或永恒原型学说，就以哲学语言表达了这种永恒的信念。例如，在伊斯兰教传入之前的伊朗，现实具有双重性：既有可见的（getik）天空，也有我们无法用正常感知看到的（menok ）天界。对于更为抽象的精神现实也是如此：我们在尘世（getik）所做的每一项祈祷或善行，都会在天界得到体现，从而赋予其真实的现实性和永恒的意义。

The Ismailis feared that the Faylasufs were concentrating too much on the external and rationalistic elements of religion and were neglecting its spiritual kernel. They had, for example, opposed the free thinker ar-Razi. But they had also developed their own philosophy and science, which were not regarded as ends in themselves but as spiritual disciplines to enable them to perceive the inner meaning (batin) of the Koran. Contemplating the abstractions of science and mathematics purified their minds of sensual imagery and freed them from the limitations of their workaday consciousness. Instead of using science to gain an accurate and literal understanding of external reality, as we do, the Ismailis used it to develop their imaginations. They turned to the old Zoroastrian myths of Iran, fused them with some Neoplatonic ideas and evolved a new perception of salvation history. It will be recalled that in more traditional societies, people believed that their experience here below repeated events that had taken place in the celestial world: Plato’s doctrine of the forms or eternal archetypes had expressed this perennial belief in a philosophical idiom. In pre-Islamic Iran, for example, reality had a double aspect: there was thus a visible (getik) sky and a heavenly (menok) sky that we could not see with our normal perception. The same was true of more abstract, spiritual realities: every prayer or virtuous deed that we perform here and now in the getik was duplicated in the celestial world which gave it true reality and eternal significance.

这些天上的原型之所以被认为是真实的，正如我们想象中的事件和形式往往比我们平凡的现实生活更真实、更有意义一样。这可以被视为一种尝试，旨在解释我们为何坚信，尽管有大量令人沮丧的反面证据，我们的生活和我们所经历的世界仍然具有意义和重要性。十世纪，伊斯玛仪派复兴了这一神话。波斯穆斯林皈依伊斯兰教后放弃了这一神话，但它仍然是他们文化遗产的一部分。伊斯玛仪派将这一神话与柏拉图的流溢论巧妙地融合在一起。法拉比曾设想在上帝与物质世界之间存在十个流溢，这些流溢凌驾于托勒密体系之上。如今，伊斯玛仪派将先知穆罕默德塑造成……而伊玛目们则是这天界体系的“灵魂”。在第一层天界的最高“先知”领域，是穆罕默德；在第二层天界，是阿里；七位伊玛目依次主宰着后续的领域。最后，在最接近物质世界的领域，是穆罕默德的女儿法蒂玛，阿里的妻子，正是她成就了这条神圣的血脉。因此，她是伊斯兰教之母，与神圣智慧索菲亚相对应。这种将伊玛目神化的形象反映了伊斯玛仪派对什叶派历史真正意义的解读。这并非仅仅是一系列外在的、世俗的事件——其中许多是悲剧性的。这些杰出人物在世间的生活与原型秩序（menok）中的事件相对应^。4

These heavenly archetypes were felt to be true in the same way as the events and forms that inhabit our imaginations often seem more real and significant to us than our mundane existence. It can be seen as an attempt to explain our conviction that, despite the mass of dispiriting evidence to the contrary, our lives and the world we experience have meaning and importance. In the tenth century, the Ismailis revived this mythology, which had been abandoned by Persian Muslims when they converted to Islam but which was still part of their cultural inheritance, and fused it imaginatively with the Platonic doctrine of emanation. Al-Farabi had envisaged ten emanations between God and the material world which presided over the Ptolemaic spheres. Now the Ismailis made the Prophet and the Imams the “souls” of this celestial scheme. In the highest “prophetic” sphere of the First Heaven was Muhammad; in the Second Heaven was Ali, and each of the seven Imams presided over the succeeding spheres in due order. Finally in the sphere nearest to the material world was Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, Ali’s wife, who had made this sacred line possible. She was, therefore, the Mother of Islam and corresponded with Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This image of the apotheosized Imams reflected the Ismaili interpretation of the true meaning of Shii history. This had not just been a succession of external, mundane events—many of them tragic. The lives of these illustrious human beings here on earth had corresponded to events in the menok, the archetypal order.⁴

我们不应轻易将其斥为妄想。如今西方以追求客观准确而自豪，但伊斯玛仪派的巴提尼（batini）信徒，他们探寻的是宗教的“隐秘”（batin）层面，其追求截然不同。如同诗人或画家一般，他们运用象征手法，这些手法与逻辑几乎毫无关联，但他们却认为这些手法揭示了一种超越感官感知或理性概念表达的更深层次的现实。因此，他们发展出一种名为“塔维勒”（tawil，字面意思是“带回”）的古兰经诵读方法。他们认为这种方法能让他们回归到最初的古兰经原型，即在穆罕默德于盖提克（getik）诵读古兰经时，于梅诺克（menok）中被念诵的那部经文。已故的伊朗什叶派历史学家亨利·科尔宾（Henri Corbin）曾将塔维勒的修行比作音乐中的和声。仿佛伊斯玛仪派信徒能够同时在多个层面聆听“声音”——一段《古兰经》经文或一段圣训；他试图训练自己聆听其天籁之音以及阿拉伯语词汇。这种努力平息了他喧嚣的批判思维，使他意识到每个词语周围的寂静，正如印度教徒聆听神圣音节“唵”（OUM）周围那难以言喻的寂静一样。当他聆听这寂静时，他意识到我们对上帝的言语和观念与完整的现实之间存在着巨大的鸿沟。5^伊斯玛仪派的领袖思想家阿布·雅库布·西吉斯坦尼（卒于公元971年）解释说，这种修行帮助穆斯林以应有的方式理解上帝。穆斯林常常以拟人化的方式谈论上帝，将他描绘成一个超越现实的人物，而另一些人则剥夺了他所有的宗教意义，将上帝简化为一个概念。西吉斯坦尼则提倡使用双重否定。我们应该先用否定词来谈论上帝，例如，说他是“非存在”而不是“存在”，说他是“非无知”而不是“智慧”，等等。但我们应该立即否定这种近乎死板的描述。抽象否定，即说上帝“并非无知”或“并非虚无”，正如我们通常使用“虚无”一词一样。祂并不符合任何人类的语言表达方式。通过反复运用这种语言训练，巴蒂尼人会逐渐意识到语言在试图传达上帝的奥秘时是多么的不足。

We should not be too quick to deride this as a delusion. Today in the West we pride ourselves on our concern for objective accuracy, but the Ismaili batinis, who sought the “hidden” (batin) dimension of religion, were engaged in a quite different quest. Like poets or painters, they used symbolism which bore little relation to logic but which they felt revealed a deeper reality than could be perceived by the senses or expressed in rational concepts. Accordingly they developed a method of reading the Koran which they called tawil (literally, “carrying back”). They felt that this would take them back to the original archetypal Koran, which had been uttered in the menok at the same time as Muhammad had recited it in the getik. Henri Corbin, the late historian of Iranian Shiism, has compared the discipline of tawil to that of harmony in music. It was as though the Ismaili could hear a “sound”—a verse of the Koran or a hadith—on several levels at the same time; he was trying to train himself to hear its heavenly counterpart as well as the Arabic words. The effort stilled his clamorous critical faculty and made him conscious of the silence that surrounds each word in much the same way as a Hindu listens to the ineffable silence surrounding the sacred syllable OUM. As he listened to the silence, he became aware of the gulf that exists between our words and ideas of God and the full reality.⁵ It was a discipline that helped Muslims to understand God as he deserved to be understood, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani, a leading Ismaili thinker (d. 971), explained. Muslims often spoke about God anthropomorphically, making him a larger-than-life man, while others drained him of all religious meaning and reduced God to a concept. Instead, al-Sijistani advocated the use of the double negative. We should begin by talking about God in negatives, saying, for example, that he was “nonbeing” rather than “being,” “not ignorant” rather than “wise” and so forth. But we should immediately negate that rather lifeless and abstract negation, saying that God is “not not-ignorant” or that he is “not No-thing” in the way that we normally use the word. He does not correspond to any human way of speaking. By a repeated use of this linguistic discipline, the batini would become aware of the inadequacy of language when it tried to convey the mystery of God.

后世伊斯玛仪派思想家哈米德·丁·基尔马尼（卒于1021年）在其著作《理智的慰藉》（ Rahaf al-aql）中描述了这种修行所带来的巨大平静与满足。它绝非枯燥乏味的脑力训练或卖弄学问，而是赋予伊斯玛仪派信徒生活的方方面面以意义。伊斯玛仪派作家经常用启迪和转变来描述他们的灵修（batin）。灵修的目的并非提供关于上帝的信息，而是为了创造一种超越理性、深入人心的敬畏之感。它也并非逃避现实。伊斯玛仪派是政治行动者。事实上，第六任伊玛目贾法尔·伊本·萨迪克曾将信仰定义为行动。如同先知和历代伊玛目一样，信徒必须在世俗世界中践行他们对上帝的理解。

Hamid al-Din Kirmani (d. 1021), a later Ismaili thinker, described the immense peace and satisfaction that this exercise produced in his Rahaf al-aql (Balm for the Intellect). It was by no means an arid, cerebral discipline, a pedantic trick, but invested every detail of the Ismaili’s life with a sense of significance. Ismaili writers frequently spoke of their batin in terms of illumination and transformation. Tawil was not designed to provide information about God but to create a sense of wonder that enlightened the batini at a level deeper than the rational. Nor was it escapism. The Ismailis were political activists. Indeed, Jafar ibn Sadiq, the Sixth Imam, had defined faith as action. Like the Prophet and the Imams, the believer had to make his vision of God effective in the mundane world.

这些理念也为伊克万·萨法（Ikwan al-Safa ，又称纯洁兄弟会）所认同。纯洁兄弟会是一个神秘主义社团，于什叶派时期在巴士拉兴起。他们很可能是伊斯玛仪派的一个分支。与伊斯玛仪派一样，他们致力于科学研究，尤其精通数学和占星术，同时也积极参与政治活动。同样，他们也在探寻“巴廷” （batin） ，即生命的隐秘意义。他们的书信集（Rasail）后来成为一部哲学百科全书，广受欢迎，甚至远销西班牙西部。纯洁兄弟会再次将科学与神秘主义相结合。数学被视为哲学和心理学的序曲。各种数字揭示了灵魂中固有的不同特质，也是一种集中精神的方法，使修行者能够觉察自身思维的运作。正如圣奥古斯丁认为自我认知对于认识上帝不可或缺一样，对自我的深刻理解也成为了伊斯兰神秘主义的核心。苏菲派，即逊尼派神秘主义者，与伊斯玛仪派有着深厚的渊源，他们有一句格言：“认识自己的人，就认识了他的主。” 这句话被引用在《弟兄会第一封信》中。 ⁶当他们思考灵魂的种种奥秘时，他们被引导回到最初的“一”，即存在于心灵深处的人类自我原则。弟兄会与费拉苏夫派也十分接近。如同穆斯林理性主义者一样，他们强调真理的统一性，认为真理必须在各个领域中寻求。一个追求真理的人必须“不回避任何科学，不轻视任何书籍，也不狂热地坚持任何单一的信条。” ⁷ 他们发展出了一种新柏拉图主义的观念。他们视上帝为普罗提诺笔下不可言喻、不可理解的“一”。与费拉苏夫派一样，他们信奉柏拉图的流溢论，而非传统的古兰经无中生有的创造论：世界体现了神圣的理性，而人可以通过净化自身的理性力量，参与到神圣之中，回归到“一”之中。

These ideals were also shared by the Ikwan al-Safa, the Brethren of Purity, an esoteric society that arose in Basra during the Shii century. The Brethren were probably an offshoot of Ismailism. Like the Ismailis, they dedicated themselves to the pursuit of science, particularly mathematics and astrology, as well as to political action. Like the Ismailis, the Brethren were searching for the batin, the hidden meaning of life. Their Epistles (Rasail), which became an encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, were extremely popular and spread as far west as Spain. Again, the Brethren combined science and mysticism. Mathematics was seen as a prelude to philosophy and psychology. The various numbers revealed the different qualities inherent in the soul and were a method of concentration that enabled the adept to become aware of the workings of his mind. Just as St. Augustine had seen self-knowledge as indispensable to the knowledge of God, a deep understanding of the self became the kingpin of Islamic mysticism. The Sufis, the Sunni mystics with whom the Ismailis felt great affinity, had an axiom: “He who knows himself, knows his Lord.” This was quoted in the First Epistle of the Brethren.⁶ As they contemplated the numbers of the soul, they were led back to the primal One, the principle of the human self in the heart of the psyche. The Brethren were also very close to the Faylasufs. Like the Muslim rationalists, they emphasized the unity of truth, which must be sought everywhere. A seeker after truth must “shun no science, scorn no book, nor cling fanatically to a single creed.”⁷ They developed a Neoplatonic conception of God, whom they saw as the ineffable, incomprehensible One of Plotinus. Like the Faylasufs, they adhered to the Platonic doctrine of emanation rather than the traditional Koranic doctrine of creation ex nihilo: the world expressed the divine Reason, and man could participate in the divine and return to the One by purifying his rational powers.

哲学（Falsafah）在阿布·阿里·伊本·西那（980-1037）的著作中达到顶峰，他在西方被称为阿维森纳。伊本·西那出生于中亚布哈拉附近的一个什叶派官员家庭，也受到伊斯玛仪派的影响，后者经常来与他的父亲辩论。他自幼聪颖过人：十六岁时就成为重要医生的顾问，十八岁时精通数学、逻辑和物理。然而，他对亚里士多德的理论感到困惑，直到读到法拉比的《亚里士多德形而上学的意图》后才豁然开朗。他以游方医生的身份游历于伊斯兰帝国各地，依靠赞助人的意愿行事。他一度成为什叶派布韦希王朝的维齐尔（宰相），该王朝统治着如今伊朗西部和伊拉克南部的地区。他是一位才华横溢、思路清晰的知识分子，绝非枯燥乏味的学究。他还是个享乐主义者，据说因为过度沉迷于酒和性，英年早逝，年仅五十八岁。

Falsafah reached its apogee in the work of Abu Ali ibn Sina (980–1037), who was known in the West as Avicenna. Born of a family of Shii officials near Bukhara in Central Asia, Ibn Sina was also influenced by the Ismailis who used to come and argue with his father. He became a child prodigy: by the time he was sixteen he was the adviser of important physicians, and at eighteen he had mastered mathematics, logic and physics. He had difficulty with Aristotle, however, but saw the light when he came across al-Farabi’s Intentions of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He lived as a peripatetic physician, wandering through the Islamic empire, dependent upon the whim of his patrons. At one point he became the vizier of the Shii Buyid dynasty, which ruled in what is now western Iran and southern Iraq. A brilliant, lucid intellectual, he was no dried-up pedant. He was also a sensualist and was said to have died at the quite early age of fifty-eight because of excessive indulgence in wine and sex.

伊本·西那意识到，哲学（Falsafah）需要适应伊斯兰帝国内部不断变化的环境。阿拔斯王朝的哈里发政权日渐衰落，人们不再能轻易地将哈里发国家视为柏拉图在《理想国》中所描述的那种理想的哲学社会。伊本·西那自然同情什叶派的精神和政治诉求，但他更倾向于哲学（Falsafah）的新柏拉图主义，并且比以往任何一位哲学家都更成功地将其伊斯兰化。他认为，如果哲学（Falsafah）要真正实现其展现完整现实图景的承诺，就必须更好地理解普通民众的宗教信仰——无论人们如何解读，这都是政治、社会和个人生活中一个重要的事实。伊本·西那并没有将启示宗教视为哲学（Falsafah）的低级版本，而是认为像穆罕默德这样的先知优于任何哲学家，因为他不依赖于人类的理性，而是拥有对上帝的直接而直觉的认知。这与苏菲派的神秘体验相似，普罗提诺本人也曾将其描述为智慧的最高形式。但这并不意味着理性无法理解上帝。伊本·西那基于亚里士多德的论证，对上帝的存在进行了理性的论证，这后来成为犹太教和伊斯兰教中世纪哲学家们的标准论证。他和费拉苏夫派都对上帝的存在毫不怀疑。他们从未怀疑过，仅凭人类理性就能理解上帝。最终获得对至高存在之存在的认知。理性是人类最崇高的活动：它蕴含着神圣的理性，并在宗教探索中扮演着重要的角色。伊本·西那认为，对于那些具备理性能力的人来说，通过这种方式自行发现上帝是一种宗教义务，因为理性能够完善对上帝的理解，使其摆脱迷信和拟人化的偏见。伊本·西那及其后继者致力于以理性论证上帝的存在，他们并非在与我们今天意义上的无神论者争论。他们希望运用理性尽可能多地探索上帝的本质。

Ibn Sina had realized that Falsafah needed to adapt to the changing conditions within the Islamic empire. The Abbasid caliphate was in decline, and it was no longer so easy to see the caliphal state as the ideal philosophic society described by Plato in the Republic. Naturally Ibn Sina sympathized with the spiritual and political aspirations of the Shiah, but he was more attracted to the Neoplatonism of Falsafah, which he Islamized with more success than any previous Faylasuf. He believed that if Falsafah was to live up to its claims of presenting a complete picture of reality, it must make more sense of the religious belief of ordinary people, which—however one chose to interpret it—was a major fact of political, social and personal life. Instead of seeing revealed religion as an inferior version of Falsafah, Ibn Sina held that a prophet like Muhammad was superior to any philosopher because he was not dependent upon human reason but enjoyed a direct and intuitive knowledge of God. This was similar to the mystical experience of the Sufis and had been described by Plotinus himself as the highest form of wisdom. This did not mean, however, that the intellect could make no sense of God. Ibn Sina worked out a rational demonstration of the existence of God based on Aristotle’s proofs which became standard among later medieval philosophers in both Judaism and Islam. Neither he nor the Faylasufs had the slightest doubt that God existed. They never doubted that unaided human reason could arrive at a knowledge of the existence of a Supreme Being. Reason was man’s most exalted activity: it partook of the divine reason and clearly had an important role in the religious quest. Ibn Sina saw it as a religious duty for those who had the intellectual ability to discover God for themselves in this way to do so, because reason could refine the conception of God and free it of superstition and anthropomorphism. Ibn Sina and those of his successors who put their minds to a rational demonstration of God’s existence were not arguing with atheists in our sense of the word. They wanted to use reason to discover as much as they could about the nature of God.

伊本·西那的“论证”始于对我们思维运作方式的思考。无论我们观察世界何处，看到的都是由多种不同元素构成的复合体。例如，一棵树由木材、树皮、髓心、树液和树叶组成。当我们试图理解某事物时，我们会对其进行“分析”，将其分解成各个组成部分，直至无法再进一步细分。在我们看来，简单的元素似乎是首要的，而它们构成的复合体则显得次要。因此，我们不断地寻求简单性，寻求那些不可分割的本质。哲学的一个公理是，现实构成一个逻辑连贯的整体；这意味着我们对简单的无尽追求必然反映了宏观层面的事物。与所有柏拉图主义者一样，伊本·西那认为，我们周围所见的多元性必然依赖于一种原始的统一性。既然我们的思维将复合体视为次要的、衍生的，那么这种倾向必然是由某种外在于复合体、更高层次的简单现实所引起的。许多事物都是偶然的，而偶然的存在低于它们所依赖的实在，正如在家庭中，子女的地位低于赋予他们生命的父亲。某种纯粹的存在，哲学家称之为“必然存在”，也就是说，它的存在不依赖于任何其他事物。这样的存在存在吗？像伊本·西那这样的费拉苏夫认为宇宙是理性的，而在一个理性的宇宙中，必然存在一个无因的存在，一个位于存在层级顶端的不动的推动者。必然有某种东西启动了因果链。如果缺少这样一个至高无上的存在，就意味着我们的心智与整个实在不相符。反过来，这意味着宇宙并非连贯且理性的。这个构成所有多重偶然实在的至简存在，正是宗教所称的“上帝”。因为它至高无上，所以它必须绝对完美，值得尊敬和崇拜。但正因为它存在与任何其他事物都截然不同，它不仅仅是存在链条中的另一个环节。

Ibn Sina’s “proof” begins with a consideration of the way our minds work. Wherever we look in the world, we see composite beings that consist of a number of different elements. A tree, for example, consists of wood, bark, pith, sap and leaves. When we try to understand something, we “analyze” it, breaking it up into its component parts until no further division is possible. The simple elements seem primary to us and the composite beings that they form seem secondary. We are continually looking for simplicity, therefore, for beings that are irreducibly themselves. It was an axiom of Falsafah that reality forms a logically coherent whole; that meant that our endless quest for simplicity must reflect things on a large scale. Like all Platonists, Ibn Sina felt that the multiplicity we see all around us must be dependent upon a primal unity. Since our minds do regard composite things as secondary and derivative, this tendency must have been caused by something outside them that is a simple, higher reality. Multiple things are contingent, and contingent beings are inferior to the realities upon which they depend, rather as in a family children are inferior in status to the father who gave them being. Something that is Simplicity itself will be what the philosophers call a “Necessary Being,” that is, it will not depend on anything else for its existence. Is there such a being? A Faylasuf like Ibn Sina took it for granted that the cosmos was rational and in a rational universe there must be an Uncaused Being, an Unmoved Mover at the apex of the hierarchy of existence. Something must have started the chain of cause and effect. The absence of such a supreme being would mean that our minds were not in sympathy with reality as a whole. That, in turn, would mean that the universe was not coherent and rational. This utterly simple being upon which the whole of multiple, contingent reality depended was what the religions called “God.” Because it is the highest thing of all, it must be absolutely perfect and worthy of honor and worship. But because its existence was so different from that of anything else, it was not just another item in the chain of being.

哲学家和《古兰经》一致认为，上帝本身就是纯粹的：祂是独一的。因此，祂无法被分析或分解成组成部分或属性。因为祂的存在是绝对纯粹的，所以祂没有原因，没有性质，没有时间维度，我们也无法对祂做任何描述。上帝不能成为论证思考的对象，因为我们的大脑无法像处理其他事物那样处理祂。因为上帝本质上是独一无二的，所以祂不能与任何在通常意义上存在的事物进行比较。因此，当我们谈论上帝时，最好使用否定词来将祂与我们所谈论的一切事物完全区分开来。但是，既然上帝是万物的源头，我们就可以对祂做出一些假设。因为我们知道善存在，所以上帝必定是本质的或“必然的”善；因为我们知道生命、力量和知识存在，所以上帝必然以最本质、最完整的方式活着、拥有力量和智慧。亚里士多德曾教导说，既然上帝是纯粹的理性——既是推理的行为，又是思想的对象和主体——那么他只能思考自身，而无法感知较低级的、偶然的现实。这与启示中对上帝的描述不符，启示中说上帝无所不知，并且临在于受造秩序之中，积极参与其中。伊本·西那试图做出妥协：上帝至高无上，绝不会屈尊去了解像人类这样卑微、特殊的存在及其行为。正如亚里士多德所说：“有些事，最好不要看。”^上帝不能让自己沾染尘世生活中那些真正卑微琐碎的细枝末节。但在他永恒的自我认知中，上帝领悟着一切源于他、由他创造的事物。他深知自己是万物之源。他的思想如此完美，以至于思考与行动合二为一，因此他对自身的永恒沉思便产生了费拉苏夫夫妇所描述的流溢过程。然而，上帝对我们和我们的世界只有普遍的认识，他并不关注具体细节。

The philosophers and the Koran were in agreement that God was simplicity itself: he was One. It follows, therefore, that he cannot be analyzed or broken down into component parts or attributes. Because this being is absolutely simple, it has no cause, no qualities, no temporal dimension, and there is absolutely nothing that we can say about it. God cannot be the object of discursive thought, because our brains cannot deal with him in the way that they deal with everything else. Because God is essentially unique, he cannot be compared to any of the things that exist in the normal, contingent sense. Consequently when we talk about God it is better to use negatives to distinguish him absolutely from everything else that we talk about. But since God is the source of all things, we can postulate certain things about him. Because we know that goodness exists, God must be essential or “necessary” Goodness; because we know that life, power and knowledge exist, God must be alive, powerful and intelligent in the most essential and complete manner, Aristotle had taught that since God is pure Reason—at one and the same time, the act of reasoning as well as the object and subject of thought—he could only contemplate himself and take no cognizance of lesser, contingent reality. This did not agree with the portrait of God in revelation, who is said to know all things and to be present and active in the created order. Ibn Sina attempted a compromise: God is far too exalted to descend to the knowledge of such ignoble, particular beings as men and their doings. As Aristotle had said, “There are some things which it is better not to see than to see.”⁸ God could not sully himself with some of the really base and trivial minutiae of life on earth. But in his eternal act of self-knowledge, God apprehends everything that has emanated from him and that he has brought into being. He knows that he is the cause of contingent creatures. His thought is so perfect that thinking and doing are one and the same act, so his eternal contemplation of himself generates the process of emanation described by the Faylasufs. But God knows us and our world only in general and universal terms; he does not deal in particulars.

然而，伊本·西那并不满足于这种对上帝本质的抽象描述：他希望将其与信徒、苏菲派和巴蒂尼派的宗教体验联系起来。他对宗教心理学颇感兴趣，并运用普罗提诺的流溢论来解释预言的体验。在存在从“一”下降的十个阶段中，伊本·西那推测，十种纯粹的智慧，连同赋予每个阶段生命的灵魂或天使，共同作用于万物。十个托勒密体系中的运行领域构成了人与神之间的中间领域，对应于巴蒂尼（batinis）所想象的原型现实世界。这些智慧体也拥有想象力；事实上，它们本身就是纯粹的想象力，正是通过这个想象的中间领域——而非通过论证理性——人类才能对神达到最完整的领悟。在我们自身领域中的最后一个智慧体——第十个——是启示的圣灵，被称为加百列，是光明和知识的源泉。人的灵魂由实践理智和沉思理智组成，前者与这个世界相关，后者能够与加百列亲密相处。因此，先知们有可能获得一种类似于智慧体所拥有的、超越实践理性和论证理性的、关于神的直觉式的、想象式的认知。苏菲派的经验表明，人们无需运用逻辑和理性，也能获得一种在哲学上站得住脚的对神的理解。他们不采用三段论，而是运用象征和意象等富有想象力的工具。先知穆罕默德完善了这种与神圣世界直接相连的境界。这种对启示和异象的心理学解读，将使那些更倾向于哲学思考的苏菲派信徒能够探讨他们自身的宗教体验，我们将在下一章中看到这一点。

Yet Ibn Sina was not content with this abstract account of God’s nature: he wanted to relate it to the religious experience of believers, Sufis and batinis. Interested in religious psychology, he used the Plotinan scheme of emanation to explain the experience of prophecy. At each of the ten phases of the descent of being from the One, Ibn Sina speculated that the ten pure Intelligences, together with the souls or angels which set each of the ten Ptolemaic spheres in motion, form an intermediate realm between man and God, which corresponds to the world of archetypal reality imagined by the batinis. These Intelligences also possess imagination; indeed, they are Imagination in its pure state and it is through this intermediate realm of imagination—not through discursive reason—that men and women reach their most complete apprehension of God. The last of the Intelligences in our own sphere—the tenth—is the Holy Spirit of Revelation, known as Gabriel, the source of light and knowledge. The human soul is composed of practical intellect, which relates to this world, and the contemplative intellect, which is able to live in close intimacy with Gabriel. Thus it is possible for the prophets to gain an intuitive, imaginative knowledge of God, akin to that enjoyed by the Intelligences, that transcends practical, discursive reason. The experience of the Sufis showed that it was possible for people to attain a vision of God that was philosophically sound without using logic and rationality. Instead of syllogisms, they used the imaginative tools of symbolism and imagery. The Prophet Muhammad had perfected this direct union with the divine world. This psychological interpretation of vision and revelation would enable the more philosophically inclined Sufis to discuss their own religious experience, as we shall see in the next chapter.

事实上，伊本·西那晚年似乎也成为了一位神秘主义者。在他的著作《劝诫之书》（ Kitab al-Asherat）中，他显然开始批判理性主义对上帝的理解，并认为这种理解令人沮丧。他转向了他所谓的“东方哲学”（al-hikmat al-mashriqiyyeh）。这里指的并非东方的地理位置，而是光明的源泉。他打算撰写一部秘传著作，其方法将基于启迪（ishraq）的修行以及理性推理。我们并不确定他是否真的写过这部著作：如果写过，也已失传。但是，正如我们将在下一章中看到的，伟大的伊朗哲学家叶海亚·苏赫拉瓦尔迪创立了启迪学派，该学派确实以伊本·西那所设想的方式将哲学与灵性融合在一起。

Indeed at the end of his life Ibn Sina seems to have become a mystic himself. In his treatise Kitab al-Asherat (The Book of Admonitions), he was clearly becoming critical of the rational approach to God, which he found frustrating. He was turning toward what he called “Oriental Philosophy” (al-hikmat al-mashriqiyyeh). This did not refer to the geographical location of the East but to the source of light. He intended to write an esoteric treatise in which the methods would be based on a discipline of illumination (ishraq) as well as ratiocination. We are not sure whether he ever wrote this treatise: if he did, it has not survived. But, as we shall also see in the next chapter, the great Iranian philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi would found the Ishraqi school, which did fuse philosophy with spirituality in the way envisaged by Ibn Sina.

卡拉姆（Kalam）和法尔萨法（Falsafah）的学科启发了伊斯兰帝国犹太人中类似的思想运动。他们开始用阿拉伯语撰写自己的哲学著作，首次将形而上学和思辨元素引入犹太教。与穆斯林的法拉苏夫（Faylasuf）不同，犹太哲学家并不关注哲学科学的全部领域，而是几乎完全专注于宗教问题。他们认为必须以伊斯兰教自身的方式回应其挑战，而这需要调和《圣经》中人格化的上帝。与费拉苏夫派的上帝一样，他们也对经文和《塔木德》中拟人化的上帝形象感到困惑，并质疑上帝如何能与哲学家们所理解的上帝相同。他们也思考着世界的起源以及启示与理性之间的关系。他们自然得出了不同的结论，但他们深受穆斯林思想家的影响。例如，萨迪亚·伊本·约瑟夫（882-942）是第一个对犹太教进行哲学诠释的人，他既是《塔木德》学者，也是穆尔太齐赖派信徒。他相信理性能够凭借自身的力量获得对上帝的认识。如同费拉苏夫派一样，他将获得对上帝的理性认知视为一种诫命（mitzvah），即宗教义务。然而，与穆斯林理性主义者一样，萨迪亚对上帝的存在毫不怀疑。萨迪亚认为造物主上帝的真实存在如此显而易见，以至于他觉得需要在他的《信仰与观点之书》中证明的是宗教怀疑的可能性，而不是信仰的可能性。

The disciplines of Kalam and Falsafah had inspired a similar intellectual movement among the Jews of the Islamic empire. They began to write their own philosophy in Arabic, introducing a metaphysical and speculative element into Judaism for the first time. Unlike the Muslim Faylasufs, the Jewish philosophers did not concern themselves with the full range of philosophical science but concentrated almost entirely on religious matters. They felt that they had to answer the challenge of Islam on its own terms, and that involved squaring the personalistic God of the Bible with the God of the Faylasufs. Like the Muslims, they worried about the anthropomorphic portrait of God in the scriptures and the Talmud and asked themselves how he could be the same as the God of the philosophers. They worried about the problem of the creation of the world and about the relation between revelation and reason. They naturally came to different conclusions, but they were deeply dependent upon the Muslim thinkers. Thus Saadia ibn Joseph (882–942), the first to undertake a philosophical interpretation of Judaism, was a Talmudist but also a Mutazili. He believed that reason could attain a knowledge of God by means of its own powers. Like a Faylasuf, he saw the attainment of a rational conception of God as a mitzvah, a religious duty. Yet like the Muslim rationalists, Saadia had no doubts whatever about the existence of God. The reality of the Creator God seemed so obvious to Saadia that it was the possibility of religious doubt rather than faith that he felt needed to be proven in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions.

萨迪亚认为，犹太人无需费尽心思去理解启示的真理。但这并不意味着上帝完全可以被人类理性所理解。萨迪亚承认，无中生有的创造论充满了哲学上的难题，无法用理性来解释，因为法尔萨法中的上帝不可能突然做出决定并启动改变。一个物质世界怎么可能起源于一个完全精神的上帝呢？在这里，我们已经触及了理性的极限，只能接受世界并非如柏拉图主义者所认为的那样永恒，而是在时间中有一个开端。这是唯一符合圣经和常识的解释。一旦我们接受了这一点，我们就可以推导出关于上帝的其他事实。被创造的秩序是经过精心设计的；它拥有生命和能量：因此，创造它的上帝也必然拥有智慧、生命和力量。这些属性并非如基督教三位一体教义所暗示的那样是分离的位格，而仅仅是上帝的不同方面。正是因为我们人类的语言无法充分表达上帝的实在，我们才不得不以这种方式分析他，似乎破坏了他绝对的单纯性。如果我们想要尽可能精确地描述上帝，我们只能说他存在。然而，萨迪亚并非禁止对上帝进行任何积极的描述，他也没有将哲学家们遥远而冷漠的上帝置于圣经中人格化的上帝之上。例如，当他试图解释我们所看到的世间苦难时，萨迪亚便援引了智慧书作者和《塔木德》的解答。他说，苦难是对罪的惩罚；它净化和管教我们，使我们谦卑。但这并不能满足真正的法伊拉苏夫（Faylasuf，意为“神圣的”），因为它把上帝描绘得过于完美。萨迪亚认为，人是神，并赋予他计划和意图。但他并不认为圣经启示的神逊于哲学家们所信奉的神。先知们的智慧远胜于任何哲学家。归根结底，理性只能尝试系统地阐释圣经的教导。

A Jew was not required to strain his reason to accept the truths of revelation, Saadia argued. But that did not mean that God was entirely accessible to human reason. Saadia acknowledged that the idea of the creation ex nihilo was fraught with philosophical difficulties and impossible to explain in rational terms, because the God of Falsafah is not capable of making a sudden decision and initiating change. How could a material world have its origin in a wholly spiritual God? Here we had reached the limits of reason and must simply accept that the world was not eternal, as Platonists believed, but had a beginning in time. This was the only possible explanation that agreed with scripture and common sense. Once we have accepted this, we can deduce other facts about God. The created order is intelligently planned; it has life and energy: therefore God, who created it, must also have Wisdom, Life and Power. These attributes are not separate hypostases, as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity suggested, but mere aspects of God. It is only because our human language cannot adequately express the reality of God that we have to analyze him in this way and seem to destroy his absolute simplicity. If we want to be as exact about God as possible, we can only properly say that he exists. Saadia does not forbid all positive description of God, however, nor does he put the remote and impersonal God of the philosophers above the personal, anthropomorphic God of the Bible. When, for example, he tries to explain the suffering that we see in the world, Saadia resorts to the solutions of the Wisdom writers and the Talmud. Suffering, he says, is a punishment for sin; it purifies and disciplines us in order to make us humble. This would not have satisfied a true Faylasuf because it makes God far too human and attributes plans and intentions to him. But Saadia does not see the revealed God of scripture as inferior to the God of Falsafah. The prophets were superior to any philosopher. Ultimately reason could only attempt to demonstrate systematically what the Bible had taught.

其他犹太人走得更远。新柏拉图主义者所罗门·伊本·加比罗尔（约1022年—约1070年）在其著作《生命之泉》中，无法接受无中生有的创造论，而是试图调整流溢论，以赋予上帝一定程度的自发性和自由意志。他声称上帝有意或渴望流溢的过程，从而试图使其不那么机械化，并表明上帝掌控着存在的法则，而非受制于同样的动力。但加比罗尔未能充分解释物质如何源于上帝。其他人则不那么具有创新性。巴赫亚·伊本·帕库达（约卒于1080年）并非严格的柏拉图主义者，但他会在需要时采用卡拉姆的方法。因此，与萨迪亚一样，他认为上帝在某个特定的时刻创造了世界。世界绝非偶然产生：这种想法如同认为墨水洒在纸上就能凭空生成一段完美的文字一样荒谬。世界的秩序和目的性表明必然存在一位造物主，正如经文所揭示的那样。巴赫亚提出这一极不合逻辑的理论后，便从卡拉姆（Kalam，伊斯兰教义学）转向法尔萨法（Falsafah，哲学），列举了伊本·西那的论证，证明必然存在一位纯粹的、不可或缺的存在。

Other Jews went further. In his Fountain of Life, the Neoplatonist Solomon ibn Gabirol (ca. 1022–ca. 1070) could not accept the doctrine of creation ex nihilo but tried to adapt the theory of emanation to allow God some degree of spontaneity and free will. He claimed that God had willed or desired the process of emanation, thereby attempting to make it less mechanical and indicate that God was in control of the laws of existence instead of subject to the same dynamic. But Gabirol failed to explain adequately how matter could derive from God. Others were less innovative. Bahya ibn Pakudah (d. ca. 1080) was not a strict Platonist but retreated to the methods of Kalam whenever it suited him. Thus, like Saadia, he argued that God had created the world at a particular moment. The world had certainly not come into being by accident: that would be as ridiculous an idea as imagining that a perfectly written paragraph came into being when ink was spilled on a page. The order and purposiveness of the world shows that there must be a Creator, as scripture had revealed. Having thus put forward this highly unphilosophical doctrine, Bahya switched from Kalam to Falsafah, listing Ibn Sina’s proof that a Necessary, Simple Being had to exist.

巴赫亚认为，只有先知和哲学家才能真正正确地敬拜上帝。先知对上帝拥有直接的、直觉式的认知，哲学家则拥有理性的认知。其他人只不过是在崇拜他们自身的投射，一个按照他们自身形象创造的上帝。如果他们不去亲自验证上帝的存在和唯一性，他们就如同盲人一般，被其他人牵着鼻子走。巴赫亚和任何一位费拉苏夫一样，都带有精英主义色彩，但他同时也有着强烈的苏菲倾向：理性可以告诉我们上帝存在，却无法告诉我们任何关于上帝的事情。正如其标题所示，巴赫亚的著作《心灵的职责》运用理性来帮助我们培养对上帝的正确态度。如果新柏拉图主义与他的犹太教信仰相冲突，他便会毫不犹豫地抛弃它。他对上帝的宗教体验凌驾于任何理性主义方法之上。

Bahya believed that the only people who worshipped God properly were prophets and philosophers. The prophet had a direct, intuitive knowledge of God, the philosopher a rational knowledge of him. Everybody else was simply worshipping a projection of himself, a God made in his own image. They were all like blind men, led by other human beings, if they did not try to prove the existence and unity of God for themselves. Bahya was as elitist as any Faylasuf, but he also had strong Sufi leanings: reason could tell us that God existed but could not tell us anything about him. As its title suggests, Bahya’s treatise Duties of the Heart used reason to help us to cultivate a proper attitude toward God. If Neoplatonism conflicted with his Judaism, he simply jettisoned it. His religious experience of God took precedence over any rationalistic method.

但如果理性无法告诉我们任何关于上帝的信息，那么理性地探讨神学问题又有何意义呢？这个问题困扰着穆斯林思想家阿布·哈米德·加扎利（1058-1111），他是宗教哲学史上一个至关重要且具有代表性的人物。他出生于呼罗珊，曾师从杰出的阿什阿里派神学家朱瓦伊尼学习卡拉姆，并取得了显著的成就，以至于33岁时就被任命为院长。他是巴格达著名的尼扎米亚清真寺的清真寺长老。他的任务是捍卫逊尼派教义，对抗什叶派伊斯玛仪派的挑战。然而，安萨里生性不安分，如同猎犬般孜孜不倦地探寻真理，对问题穷尽钻研，绝不满足于简单、传统的答案。正如他自己所说：

But if reason could not tell us anything about God, what was the point of rational discussion of theological matters? This question agonized the Muslim thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), a crucial and emblematic figure in the history of religious philosophy. Born in Khurasan, he had studied Kalam under Juwayni, the outstanding Asharite theologian, to such effect that at the age of thirty-three he was appointed director of the prestigious Nizamiyyah mosque in Baghdad. His brief was to defend Sunni doctrines against the Shii challenge of the Ismailis. Al-Ghazzali, however, had a restless temperament that made him struggle with truth like a terrier, worrying problems to the bitter death and refusing to be content with an easy, conventional answer. As he tells us,

他一直在寻求像萨迪亚那样的哲学家所感受到的那种毋庸置疑的确定性，但他却日益感到失望。无论他的研究多么详尽，绝对的确定性始终与他无缘。他的同时代人根据各自的个人需求和性情，以多种方式寻求上帝：通过卡拉姆（Kalam，伊斯兰教义学）、伊玛目（Imam，伊斯兰教法学家）、法尔萨法（Falsafah，伊斯兰教哲学）以及苏菲神秘主义。安萨里似乎研究过所有这些学科，试图理解“万物自在的本质”。^他研究过的伊斯兰教四大主要流派的信徒都声称自己拥有绝对的信念，但安萨里问道，这种说法如何才能客观地得到验证呢？

He was searching for the kind of indubitable certainty that a philosopher like Saadia felt, but he became increasingly disillusioned. No matter how exhaustive his research, absolute certainty eluded him. His contemporaries sought God in several ways, according to their personal and temperamental needs: in Kalam, through an Imam, in Falsafah and in Sufi mysticism. Al-Ghazzali seems to have studied each of these disciplines in his attempt to understand “what all things really are in themselves.”¹⁰ The disciples of all four of the main versions of Islam that he researched claimed total conviction but, al-Ghazzali asked, how could this claim be verified objectively?

安萨里和任何现代怀疑论者一样清楚，确定性是一种心理状态，未必是客观真理。法拉苏夫派声称他们通过理性论证获得了某些知识；神秘主义者坚称他们通过苏菲的修行获得了这些知识；伊斯玛仪派则认为这些知识只能在他们的伊玛目教义中找到。但是，我们称之为“上帝”的现实无法通过经验检验，那么我们又如何确定我们的信仰并非仅仅是错觉呢？那些更符合传统理性的论证未能满足安萨里的严格标准。卡拉姆神学家从经文中寻找命题，但这些命题并未经过排除合理怀疑的验证。伊斯玛仪派依赖于一位隐秘且不可接近的伊玛目的教义，但我们如何才能确定这位伊玛目是受神启示的？如果我们找不到他，那么这种启示又有何意义呢？法尔萨法尤其令人难以满意。安萨里将相当一部分论战的矛头指向了法拉比和伊本·西那。他认为只有精通他们各自学科的专家才能驳倒他们，因此他花了三年时间研习哲学，直至完全掌握。 ¹¹在他的著作《论哲学的不连贯性》中，安萨里进一步阐述了这一点。哲学家们认为，费拉苏夫派犯了循环论证的错误。如果哲学（Falsafah）仅限于医学、天文学或数学等领域中那些世俗的、可观察的现象，它固然非常有用，但却无法告诉我们任何关于上帝的信息。究竟如何才能证明流溢论的正确与否呢？费拉苏夫派凭什么断言上帝只知晓普遍的、普遍的事物，而非具体的事物？他们能证明这一点吗？他们认为上帝至高无上，无法知晓低等的现实，这种论点站不住脚：无知何时成为过人的美德了？这些命题根本无法得到令人满意的验证，因此，费拉苏夫派寻求超越心智能力、无法通过感官验证的知识，既不理性，也不合乎哲学。

Al-Ghazzali was as aware as any modern skeptic that certainty was a psychological condition that was not necessarily objectively true. Faylasufs said that they acquired certain knowledge by rational argument; mystics insisted that they had found it through the Sufi disciplines; Ismailis felt that it was only found in the teachings of their Imam. But the reality that we call “God” cannot be tested empirically, so how could we be sure that our beliefs were not mere delusions? The more conventionally rational proofs failed to satisfy al-Ghazzali’s strict standards. The theologians of Kalam began with propositions found in scripture, but these had not been verified beyond reasonable doubt. The Ismailis depended upon the teachings of a hidden and inaccessible Imam, but how could we be certain that the Imam was divinely inspired, and if we cannot find him what is the point of this inspiration? Falsafah was particularly unsatisfactory. Al-Ghazzali directed a considerable part of his polemic against al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. Believing that they could only be refuted by an expert in their own discipline, al-Ghazzali studied Falsafah for three years until he had completely mastered it.¹¹ In his treatise The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he argued that the Faylasufs were begging the question. If Falsafah confined itself to mundane, observable phenomena as in medicine, astronomy or mathematics, it was extremely useful but it could tell us nothing about God. How could anybody prove the doctrine of emanation, one way or the other? By what authority did the Faylasufs assert that God knew only general, universal things rather than particulars? Could they prove this? Their argument that God was too exalted to know the baser realities was inadequate: since when was ignorance about anything excellent? There was no way that any of these propositions could be satisfactorily verified, so the Faylasufs had been irrational and unphilosophical by seeking knowledge that lay beyond the capacity of the mind and could not be verified by the senses.

但这对于真诚的真理追寻者来说意味着什么呢？对上帝坚定不移的信仰真的不可能吗？对真理的渴求给安萨里带来了巨大的精神压力，以至于他精神崩溃。他发现自己无法吞咽或进食，被一种沉重的厄运和绝望感所压垮。最终，大约在1094年，他发现自己无法说话，也无法进行演讲。

But where did that leave the honest seeker after truth? Was a sound, unshakable faith in God impossible? The strain of his quest caused al-Ghazzali such personal distress that he had a breakdown. He found himself unable to swallow or to eat and felt overwhelmed by a weight of doom and despair. Finally in about 1094 he found that he could not speak or give his lectures:

他患上了临床抑郁症。医生们正确地诊断出他内心深处存在冲突，并告诉他，除非他能摆脱这种隐秘的焦虑，否则他将永远无法康复。由于担心如果不能重拾信仰就会下地狱，加扎利辞去了令人艳羡的学术职位，加入了苏菲派。

He fell into a clinical depression. The doctors rightly diagnosed a deep-rooted conflict and told him that until he was delivered from his hidden anxiety, he would never recover. Fearing that he was in danger of hellfire if he did not recover his faith, al-Ghazzali resigned his prestigious academic post and went off to join the Sufis.

在那里，他找到了他一直在寻找的东西。在不放弃理性的前提下——他始终对苏菲主义中那些过于极端的形式抱有怀疑——安萨里发现，神秘主义的修行方法能够带来一种直接而直觉的感知，这种感知可以被称为“上帝”。英国学者约翰·鲍克指出，阿拉伯语中表示“存在”（wujud）的词根是wajada，意为“他找到了”。 ¹³因此，wujud的字面意思是“可寻之物”：它比希腊的形而上学术语更加具体，同时也给予了穆斯林更大的自由度。一位试图证明上帝存在的阿拉伯语哲学家无需将上帝视为众多事物之一。他只需证明上帝是可以找到的。上帝存在的唯一绝对证明是…… 当信徒死后与神圣现实面对面时，这种体验或许会显现，或许不会，但那些声称在今生体验过这种体验的人，例如先知和神秘主义者的记载，应该认真对待。苏菲派无疑声称他们体验过真主的“合一”（ wujud ）： wajd一词是他们用来描述对真主狂喜的领悟的术语，这种领悟使他们完全确信（yaqin）真主是真实存在的，而非虚幻的。诚然，这些记载可能存在错误，但经过十年的苏菲修行，安萨里发现，宗教体验是验证超越人类理智和思维过程的现实的唯一途径。苏菲派对真主的认知并非理性或形而上学的知识，但它显​​然类似于古代先知的直觉体验：苏菲派通过重温其核心体验，找到了伊斯兰教的本质真理。

There he found what he was looking for. Without abandoning his reason—he always distrusted the more extravagant forms of Sufism—al-Ghazzali discovered that the mystical disciplines yielded a direct but intuitive sense of something that could be called “God.” The British scholar John Bowker shows that the Arabic word for existence (wujud) derives from the root wajada: “he found.”¹³ Literally, therefore, wujud means “that which is findable”: it was more concrete than the Greek metaphysical terms and yet gave Muslims more leeway. An Arabic-speaking philosopher who attempted to prove that God existed did not have to produce God as another object among many. He simply had to prove that he could be found. The only absolute proof of God’s wujud would appear—or not—when the believer came face to face with the divine reality after death, but the reports of such people as the prophets and mystics who claimed to have experienced it in this life should be considered carefully. The Sufis certainly claimed that they had experienced the wujud of God: the word wajd was a technical term for their ecstatic apprehension of God which gave them complete certainty (yaqin) that it was a reality, not just a fantasy. Admittedly those reports could be mistaken in their claims, but after living for ten years as a Sufi, al-Ghazzali found that the religious experience was the only way of verifying a reality that lay beyond the reach of the human intellect and cerebral process. The Sufis’ knowledge of God was not a rational or metaphysical knowledge, but it was clearly akin to the intuitive experience of the prophets of old: Sufis thus found the essential truths of Islam for themselves by reliving its central experience.

因此，安萨里构建了一套能被穆斯林统治阶层接受的神秘主义信条。正如我们将在下一章中看到的，穆斯林统治阶层常常对伊斯兰神秘主义者抱有怀疑态度。与伊本·西那一样，他追溯到古代关于超越世俗感官体验的原型领域的信仰。可见世界（alam al-shahadah）只是他所谓的柏拉图式智慧世界（alam al-malakut）的低级复制品，任何一位法伊拉苏夫（Faylasuf）都承认这一点。《古兰经》以及犹太教和基督教的《圣经》都曾提及这个精神世界。人同时存在于两个现实领域：他既属于物质世界，也属于更高的精神世界，因为上帝已将神圣的形象铭刻于人心中。在安萨里神秘主义论著《米什卡特·安瓦尔》 （Mishkat al-Anwar）中，他阐释了我在上一章引用过的《古兰经》光明章。¹⁴经文中的“光”既指上帝，也指其他照亮世界的事物：灯、星。我们的理性也具有启迪作用。它不仅使我们能够感知其他事物，而且如同上帝本身一样，能够超越时间和空间。因此，它与精神世界共享同一实在。但为了明确他所说的“理性”并非仅仅指我们的大脑和分析能力，安萨里提醒读者，他的解释不能按字面意思理解：我们只能用比喻性的语言来探讨这些问题，而这正是创造性想象力的专属领域。

Al-Ghazzali therefore formulated a mystical creed that would be acceptable to the Muslim establishment, who had often looked askance at the mystics of Islam, as we shall see in the following chapter. Like Ibn Sina, he looked back to the ancient belief in an archetypal realm beyond this mundane world of sensory experience. The visible world (alam al-shahadah) is an inferior replica of what he called the world of the Platonic intelligence (alam al-malakut), as any Faylasuf acknowledged. The Koran and the Bible of the Jews and Christians had spoken of this spiritual world. Man straddled both realms of reality: he belonged to the physical as well as the higher world of the spirit because God had inscribed the divine image within him. In his mystical treatise Mishkat al-Anwar, al-Ghazzali interprets the Koranic Sura of Light, which I quoted in the last chapter.¹⁴ The light in these verses refers both to God and to the other illuminating objects: the lamp, the star. Our reason is also enlightening. Not only does it enable us to perceive other objects but, like God himself, it can transcend time and space. It partakes of the same reality as the spiritual world, therefore. But in order to make it clear that by “reason” he did not merely refer to our cerebral, analytic powers, al-Ghazzali reminds his readers that his explanation cannot be understood in a literal sense: we can only discuss these matters in the figurative language that is the preserve of the creative imagination.

然而，有些人拥有超越理性的力量，安萨里称之为“先知之灵”。缺乏这种能力的人不应仅仅因为自己没有体验过就否认它的存在。这就像一个五音不全的人仅仅因为自己无法欣赏音乐就声称音乐是一种幻觉一样荒谬。我们可以通过理性思考和想象力来了解一些关于神的知识，但只有像先知或神秘主义者那样拥有特殊能力的人才能获得最高层次的知识。这听起来或许有些精英主义，但其他传统的神秘主义者也声称，禅宗或佛教冥想等修行方式所需要的直觉和接受能力是一种特殊的恩赐，堪比诗歌创作的天赋。并非人人都有这种神秘天赋。安萨里将这种神秘知识描述为一种对造物主唯一存在或拥有本质的觉知。这会导致自我消融，并最终与神合一。神秘主义者能够超越隐喻的世界，而隐喻的世界只能满足那些天赋不如他们的凡人；他们

Some people possess a power that is higher than reason, however, which al-Ghazzali calls “the prophetic spirit.” People who lack this faculty should not deny that it exists simply because they have no experience of it. That would be as absurd as if somebody who was tone-deaf claimed that music was an illusion, simply because he himself could not appreciate it. We can learn something about God by means of our reasoning and imaginative powers, but the highest type of knowledge can be attained only by people like the prophets or the mystics who have this special God-enabling faculty. This sounds elitist, but mystics in other traditions have also claimed that the intuitive, receptive qualities demanded by a discipline like Zen or Buddhist meditation are a special gift, comparable to the gift of writing poetry. Not everybody has this mystical talent. Al-Ghazzali describes this mystical knowledge as an awareness that the Creator alone exists or has being. This results in the fading away of self and an absorption in God. Mystics are able to rise above the world of metaphor, which has to satisfy less gifted mortals; they

上帝不是一个外部的、客观存在的、其存在可以被理性证明的存在，而是一个包罗万象的现实和终极存在，我们不能像感知依赖于它并参与其必然存在的生物那样去感知它：我们必须培养一种特殊的观看方式。

Instead of being an external, objectified Being whose existence can be proved rationally, God is an all-enveloping reality and the ultimate existence which cannot be perceived as we perceive the beings that depend upon it and partake of its necessary existence: we have to cultivate a special mode of seeing.

安萨里最终回到巴格达继续他的教学工作，但他始终坚信，逻辑和理性证明无法证实上帝的存在。在他的传记著作《摆脱谬误》（ Al-Mundiqh min al-dalal ）中，他热情地论证，无论是哲学（Falsafah）还是教义（Kalam）都无法使那些濒临失去信仰的人安心。他自己也曾一度陷入怀疑主义（safsafah）的边缘，因为他意识到，要毫无合理怀疑地证明上帝的存在是绝对不可能的。我们称之为“上帝”的实在存在于感官知觉和逻辑思维之外，因此科学和形而上学既无法证明也无法证伪真主的存在（ wujud）。对于那些没有特殊神秘或预言天赋的人，安萨里设计了一套方法，使穆斯林能够在日常生活的细枝末节中培养对上帝存在的觉知。他对伊斯兰教产生了不可磨灭的影响。穆斯林绝不会再轻易地认为上帝和其他任何存在一样，其存在本身就是一种属性。可以通过科学或哲学方法加以证明。从此，伊斯兰哲学将与灵性以及对上帝的神秘探讨密不可分。

Al-Ghazzali eventually returned to his teaching duties in Baghdad but never lost his conviction that it was impossible to demonstrate the existence of God by logic and rational proof. In his biographical treatise Al-Mundiqh min al-dalal (The Deliverance from Error), he argued passionately that neither Falsafah nor Kalam could satisfy somebody who was in danger of losing his faith. He himself had been brought to the brink of skepticism (safsafah) when he realized that it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s existence beyond reasonable doubt. The reality that we call “God” lay outside the realm of sense perception and logical thought, so science and metaphysics could neither prove nor disprove the wujud of al-Lah. For those who were not blessed with the special mystical or prophetic talent, al-Ghazzali devised a discipline to enable Muslims to cultivate a consciousness of God’s reality in the minutiae of daily life. He made an indelible impression on Islam. Never again would Muslims make the facile assumption that God was a being like any other, whose existence could be demonstrated scientifically or philosophically. Henceforth Muslim philosophy would become inseparable from spirituality and a more mystical discussion of God.

他对犹太教也产生了影响。西班牙哲学家约瑟夫·伊本·萨迪克（卒于1143年）运用了伊本·西那关于上帝存在的证明，但他谨慎地指出，上帝并非仅仅是另一个存在——并非我们通常意义上“存在”的事物之一。如果我们声称理解上帝，那就意味着他是有限的、不完美的。我们能够对上帝做出的最准确的描述是：他是不可理解的，完全超越了我们自然的智力能力。我们可以用肯定的语言谈论上帝在世界上的活动，但无法谈论上帝的本质（al-Dhat），因为上帝的本质永远无法被我们理解。托莱多医生犹大·哈列维（1085-1141）紧随安萨里之后。上帝无法用理性证明；但这并不意味着对上帝的信仰是非理性的，而仅仅意味着对上帝存在的逻辑论证不具有宗教价值。它能告诉我们的非常有限：我们根本无法确凿地证明，这样一个遥远而冷漠的上帝是如何创造出这个并不完美的物质世界的，也无法确定他是否与这个世界存在任何有意义的联系。当哲学家们声称他们通过运用理性与赋予宇宙智慧的神圣智能合而为一时，他们只是在自欺欺人。唯一直接了解上帝的人是先知，而先知们与哲学（Falsafah）毫无瓜葛。

He also had an effect on Judaism. The Spanish philosopher Joseph ibn Saddiq (d. 1143) used Ibn Sina’s proof of the existence of God but was careful to make the point that God was not simply another being—one of the things that “exist” in our usual sense of the word. If we claimed to understand God, that would mean that he was finite and imperfect. The most exact statement that we could make about God was that he was incomprehensible, utterly transcending our natural intellectual powers. We could speak about God’s activity in the world in positive terms but not about God’s essence (al-Dhat), which would always elude us. The Toledan physician Judah Halevi (1085–1141) followed al-Ghazzali closely. God could not be proved rationally; that did not mean that faith in God was irrational but simply that a logical demonstration of his existence had no religious value. It could tell us very little: there was no way of establishing beyond reasonable doubt how such a remote and impersonal God could have created this imperfect material world or whether he related to the world in any meaningful way. When the philosophers claimed that they became united to the divine Intelligence that informs the cosmos through the exercise of reason, they were deluding themselves. The only people who had any direct knowledge of God were the prophets, who had had nothing to do with Falsafah.

哈列维对哲学的理解不如安萨里，但他认同唯一可靠的认识上帝的方式是通过宗教体验。与安萨里一样，他也假定存在一种特殊的宗教能力，但声称这是犹太人的专属特权。他试图缓和这种观点，提出非犹太人可以通过自然法认识上帝，但他的伟大哲学著作《库扎里》的目的在于论证以色列在万国中的独特地位。与《塔木德》的拉比们一样，哈列维相信任何犹太人都可以通过认真遵守诫命（mitzvot）获得先知般的精神。他将遇到的上帝并非一个可以用科学证明其存在的客观事实，而是一种本质上主观的体验。他甚至可以被视为犹太人“自然”自我的延伸。

Halevi did not understand philosophy as well as al-Ghazzali, but he agreed that the only reliable knowledge of God was by religious experience. Like al-Ghazzali, he also postulated a special religious faculty but claimed that it was the prerogative of the Jews alone. He tried to soften this by suggesting that the goyim could come to a knowledge of God through the natural law, but the purpose of The Kuzari, his great philosophical work, was to justify the unique position of Israel among the nations. Like the Rabbis of the Talmud, Halevi believed that any Jew could acquire the prophetic spirit by careful observance of the mitzvot. The God he would encounter was not an objective fact whose existence could be demonstrated scientifically but an essentially subjective experience. He could even be seen as an extension of the Jew’s “natural” self:

因此，上帝并非一种外来的、侵入性的现实，犹太人也并非与神性隔绝的独立个体。上帝可以再次被视为人类的圆满，是男女潜能的实现；此外，他所遇到的“上帝”是他独有的，我们将在下一章对此进行更深入的探讨。哈列维谨慎地区分了犹太人所能体验到的上帝与上帝本身的本质。当先知和圣徒声称体验过“上帝”时，他们并非认识了上帝本身，而只是认识了上帝内在的神圣活动，这些活动如同超越的、不可接近的现实的余晖。

God is not an alien, intrusive reality, therefore, nor is the Jew an autonomous being sealed off from the divine. God can be seen—yet again—as the completion of humanity, the fulfillment of a man or woman’s potential; furthermore, the “God” he encounters is uniquely his own, an idea that we shall explore in more depth in the following chapter. Halevi is careful to distinguish the God that Jews are able to experience from the essence of God himself. When prophets and saints claim to have experienced “God,” they have not known him as he is in himself but only in the divine activities within him that are a sort of afterglow of the transcendent, inaccessible reality.

然而，由于安萨里的论战，哲学并未完全消亡。在科尔多瓦，一位杰出的穆斯林哲学家试图复兴它，并论证它是宗教的最高形式。阿布·瓦利德·伊本·艾哈迈德·伊本·鲁什德（1126-1198），在欧洲被称为阿威罗伊，在西方犹太教徒和基督教徒中都享有盛誉。十三世纪，他的著作被翻译成希伯来语和拉丁语，他对亚里士多德的注释对迈蒙尼德、托马斯·阿奎那和阿尔伯特·马格努斯等杰出的神学家产生了深远的影响。十九世纪，欧内斯特·勒南称赞他是一位自由的灵魂，是理性主义对抗盲信的捍卫者。然而，在伊斯兰世界，伊本·鲁什德却是一位边缘人物。从他的生平及其身后的影响中，我们可以看到东西方在理解和认识上帝的方式上的分歧。伊本·鲁什德强烈反对安萨里对哲学论的谴责，以及他公开讨论这些深奥问题的方式。与他的前辈法拉比和伊本·西那不同，他既是卡迪（伊斯兰教法学家），又是哲学家。乌里玛（伊斯兰教法学家）一直对哲学论及其本质上不同的神抱有怀疑，但伊本·鲁什德成功地将亚里士多德的思想与更为传统的伊斯兰虔诚结合起来。他坚信宗教与理性之间根本不存在任何矛盾。两者以不同的方式表达了相同的真理；两者都指向同一位神。然而，并非人人都能进行哲学思考，因此哲学论只适用于知识精英。它会迷惑大众，使他们陷入危及永恒救赎的错误之中。正因如此，深奥的传统才显得尤为重要，它使这些危险的教义得以保留。那些不适合接受教义的人，就应该接受这些教义。苏菲主义和伊斯玛仪派的巴蒂尼（batini）修行也是如此；如果不适合的人尝试这些精神训练，他们可能会患上重病，并出现各种心理障碍。卡拉姆（Kalam）同样危险。它达不到真正的法尔萨法（Falsafah，哲学），并误导人们以为自己正在进行理性的讨论，而实际上并非如此。因此，它只会引发毫无意义的教义争论，这只会削弱未受过教育者的信仰，并使他们焦虑不安。

Falsafah was not entirely dead as a result of al-Ghazzali’s polemic, however. In Cordova a distinguished Muslim philosopher attempted to revive it and to argue that it was the highest form of religion. Abu al-Walid ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in Europe as Averroës, became an authority in the West among both Jews and Christians. During the thirteenth century he was translated into Hebrew and Latin, and his commentaries on Aristotle had an immense influence on such distinguished theologians as Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great. In the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan would hail him as a free spirit, the champion of rationalism against blind faith. In the Islamic world, however, Ibn Rushd was a more marginal figure. In his career and his posthumous effect, we can see a parting of the ways between East and West in their approach to and conception of God. Ibn Rushd passionately disapproved of al-Ghazzali’s condemnation of Falsafah and the way he had discussed these esoteric matters openly. Unlike his predecessors al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, he was a Qadi, a jurist of the Shariah law, as well as a philosopher. The ulema had always been suspicious of Falsafah and its fundamentally different God, but Ibn Rushd had managed to unite Aristotle with a more traditional Islamic piety. He was convinced that there was no contradiction whatsoever between religion and rationalism. Both expressed the same truth in different ways; both looked toward the same God. Not everybody was capable of philosophical thought, however, so Falsafah was only for an intellectual elite. It would confuse the masses and lead them into an error that imperiled their eternal salvation. Hence the importance of the esoteric tradition, which kept these dangerous doctrines from those unfitted to receive them. It was just the same with Sufism and the batini studies of the Ismailis; if unsuitable people attempted these mental disciplines they could become seriously ill and develop all kinds of psychological disorders. Kalam was equally dangerous. It fell short of true Falsafah and gave people the misleading idea that they were engaged in a proper rational discussion when they were not. Consequently it merely stirred up fruitless doctrinal disputes, which could only weaken the faith of uneducated people and make them anxious.

伊本·鲁什德认为，接受某些真理是得救的必要条件——这在伊斯兰世界是一种新颖的观点。费拉苏夫派是教义方面的主要权威：只有他们才有能力诠释经文，他们也是《古兰经》中所描述的“学识渊博”之人。 ¹⁷其他人应该按字面意思理解《古兰经》，但费拉苏夫派可以尝试进行象征性的诠释。然而，即使是费拉苏夫派也必须遵守一系列强制性教义，伊本·鲁什德列举如下：

Ibn Rushd believed that the acceptance of certain truths was essential to salvation—a novel view in the Islamic world. The Faylasufs were the chief authorities on doctrine: they alone were capable of interpreting the scriptures and were the people described in the Koran as “deeply rooted in knowledge.”¹⁷ Everybody else should take the Koran at face value and read it literally, but the Faylasuf could attempt a symbolic exegesis. But even the Faylasufs had to subscribe to the “creed” of obligatory doctrines, which Ibn Rushd listed as follows:

1. 上帝作为世界的创造者和维持者的存在。
2. The existence of God as Creator and Sustainer of the world.
3. 上帝的合一。
4. The Unity of God.
5. 《古兰经》中赋予真主知识、力量、意志、听觉、视觉和语言的属性。
6. The attributes of knowledge, power, will, hearing, seeing and speech, which are given to God throughout the Koran.
7. 《古兰经》42:9 明确指出真主的独特性和无与伦比性：“没有任何事物可以与他相比。”
8. The uniqueness and incomparability of God, clearly asserted in Koran 42:9: “There is nothing like unto him.”
9. 上帝创造世界。
10. The creation of the world by God.
11. 预言的有效性。
12. The validity of prophecy.
13. 上帝的公义。
14. The justice of God.
15. 末日身体复活^。18
16. The resurrection of the body on the Last Day.¹⁸

这些关于上帝的教义必须全盘接受，因为《古兰经》对此的阐述非常明确。例如，哲学家们并非一直都认同世界是由上帝创造的，因此，如何理解《古兰经》中的这些教义并不清晰。虽然《古兰经》明确指出上帝创造了世界，但它并没有说明上帝是如何创造的，也没有说明世界是在某个特定的时间点被创造的。这使得哲学家们可以自由地接受理性主义者的观点。此外，《古兰经》还提到上帝拥有诸如知识之类的属性，但我们并不确切地知道这意味着什么，因为我们对知识的理解必然是人类的，并且是不完整的。因此，《古兰经》所说的上帝知道我们所做的一切，并不一定与哲学家的观点相矛盾。

These doctrines about God must be accepted in toto, as the Koran is quite unambiguous about them. Falsafah had not always subscribed to belief in the creation of the world, for example, so it is not clear how such Koranic doctrines should be understood. Although the Koran says unequivocally that God has created the world, it does not say how he did this or whether the world was created at a particular moment in time. This left the Faylasuf free to adopt the belief of the rationalists. Again, the Koran says that God has such attributes as knowledge, but we do not know exactly what this means because our concept of knowledge is necessarily human and inadequate. The Koran does not necessarily contradict the philosophers, therefore, when it says that God knows everything that we do.

在伊斯兰世界，神秘主义盛行，以至于伊本·鲁什德基于严格理性主义神学的上帝观几乎没有产生任何影响。伊本·鲁什德在伊斯兰教中虽受尊崇，但地位并不显赫，然而他在西方却举足轻重。西方通过他发现了亚里士多德，并发展出更为理性主义的上帝观。大多数西方基督徒对伊斯兰文化知之甚少，对伊本·鲁什德之后的哲学发展也一无所知。因此，人们常常认为伊本·鲁什德的生平标志着伊斯兰哲学的终结。事实上，在伊本·鲁什德的时代，两位日后对伊斯兰世界影响深远的杰出哲学家分别在伊拉克和伊朗著述。叶海亚·苏赫拉瓦尔迪和穆伊德·丁·伊本·阿拉比追随的是伊本·西那而非伊本·鲁什德的脚步，他们试图将哲学与神秘主义灵性融合起来。我们将在下一章讨论他们的工作。

In the Islamic world, mysticism was so important that Ibn Rushd’s conception of God, based as it was on a strictly rationalist theology, had little influence. Ibn Rushd was a revered but secondary figure in Islam, but he became very important indeed in the West, which discovered Aristotle through him and developed a more rationalistic conception of God. Most Western Christians had a very limited knowledge of Islamic culture and were ignorant of philosophical developments after Ibn Rushd. Hence it is often assumed that the career of Ibn Rushd marked the end of Islamic philosophy. In fact during Ibn Rushd’s lifetime, two distinguished philosophers who would both be extremely influential in the Islamic world were writing in Iraq and Iran. Yahya Suhrawardi and Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi followed in the footsteps of Ibn Sina rather than Ibn Rushd and attempted to fuse philosophy with mystical spirituality. We shall consider their work in the next chapter.

伊本·鲁什德在犹太世界最伟大的弟子是伟大的塔木德学者和哲学家拉比摩西·伊本·迈蒙（1135-1204），通常被称为迈蒙尼德。与伊本·鲁什德一样，迈蒙尼德也出生于科尔多瓦，当时那里是穆斯林统治下的西班牙首都。在科尔多瓦，人们逐渐达成共识，认为某种哲学对于更深刻地理解上帝至关重要。然而，当西班牙沦为狂热的柏柏尔人阿尔摩拉维王朝的战俘，遭受迫害时，迈蒙尼德被迫逃离西班牙。尽管与中世纪原教旨主义的这段痛苦经历并未使迈蒙尼德对整个伊斯兰教抱有敌意。他和父母定居埃及，在那里他担任政府要职，甚至成为苏丹的御医。也是在那里，他写下了著名的《迷途指津》，论证犹太教信仰并非一套随意编造的教义，而是建立在健全的理性原则之上。与伊本·鲁什德一样，迈蒙尼德也认为哲学（Falsafah）是最高深的宗教知识，是通往真主的康庄大道，不应向大众传授，而应为哲学精英所独有。然而，与伊本·鲁什德不同的是，他认为可以教导普通民众以象征手法解读经文，从而避免他们对上帝产生拟人化的看法。他还认为某些教义对于获得救赎是必要的，并发表了一份包含十三条信条的教义，与伊本·鲁什德的教义极为相似：

Ibn Rushd’s great disciple in the Jewish world was the great Talmudist and philosopher Rabbi Moses ibn Maimon (1135–1204), who is usually known as Maimonides. Like Ibn Rushd, Maimonides was a native of Cordova, the capital of Muslim Spain, where there was a growing consensus that some kind of philosophy was essential for a deeper understanding of God. Maimonides was forced to flee Spain, however, when it fell prey to the fanatical Berber sect of the Almoravids, who persecuted the Jewish community. This painful collision with medieval fundamentalism did not make Maimonides hostile to Islam as a whole. He and his parents settled in Egypt, where he held high office in the government and even became the physician of the sultan. There, too, he wrote his famous treatise The Guide for the Perplexed, which argued that the Jewish faith was not an arbitrary set of doctrines but was based on sound rational principles. Like Ibn Rushd, Maimonides believed that Falsafah was the most advanced form of religious knowledge and the royal road to God, which must not be revealed to the masses but should remain the preserve of a philosophical elite. Unlike Ibn Rushd, however, he did believe that the ordinary people could be taught to interpret the scriptures symbolically, so as not to acquire an anthropomorphic view of God. He also believed that certain doctrines were necessary for salvation and published a creed of thirteen articles that was markedly similar to Ibn Rushd’s:

1. 上帝的存在。
2. The existence of God.
3. 神的合一。
4. The unity of God.
5. 上帝的非物质性。
6. The incorporeality of God.
7. 上帝的永恒。
8. The eternity of God.
9. 禁止偶像崇拜。
10. The prohibition of idolatry.
11. 预言的有效性。
12. The validity of prophecy.
13. 摩西是众先知中最伟大的。
14. Moses was the greatest of the prophets.
15. 真理的神圣起源。
16. The divine origin of truth.
17. 《托拉》的永恒有效性。
18. The eternal validity of the Torah.
19. 上帝知道世人的行为。
20. God knows the deeds of men.
21. 他会据此对他们进行评判。
22. He judges them accordingly.
23. 他会派遣一位弥赛亚。
24. He will send a Messiah.
25. 死人复活^。19
26. The resurrection of the dead.¹⁹

这在犹太教中是一项创新，但从未被完全接受。与伊斯兰教一样，正统观念（而非正统实践）对于犹太教的宗教体验而言是陌生的。伊本·鲁什德和迈蒙尼德的信条表明，理性主义和知识主义的宗教观会导致教条主义，并将“信仰”等同于“正确的信念”。

This was an innovation in Judaism and never became entirely accepted. As in Islam, the notion of orthodoxy (as opposed to orthopraxy) was alien to the Jewish religious experience. The creeds of Ibn Rushd and Maimonides suggest that a rationalistic and intellectualist approach to religion leads to dogmatism and to an identification of “faith” with “correct belief.”

然而，迈蒙尼德谨慎地坚持认为，上帝本质上是不可理解的，人类理性无法企及的。他借助亚里士多德和伊本·西那的论证证明了上帝的存在，但同时强调，由于上帝的绝对纯粹性，祂仍然是不可言说、不可描述的。先知们曾使用寓言，教导我们只有运用象征性的、隐喻性的语言，才能以有意义且全面的方式谈论上帝。我们知道，上帝无法与任何存在的事物相提并论。因此，当我们试图描述祂时，最好使用否定性的术语。与其说“祂存在”，不如否定祂不存在，等等。如同伊斯玛仪派一样，使用否定性语言是一种修行，它能加深我们对上帝超越性的理解，提醒我们，祂的现实与我们这些可怜的人类所能构想的任何概念都截然不同。我们甚至不能说上帝是“善的”，因为祂远远超越了我们所能理解的“善”的含义。这是一种将我们的不完美排除在上帝之外的方式，防止我们将自己的希望和欲望投射到他身上。那样就会创造出一个与我们自身形象和样式相符的上帝。然而，我们可以运用否定之道来形成一些关于上帝的积极概念。因此，当我们说上帝“并非无能”（而不是说他强大）时，逻辑上就得出上帝必然能够行动。既然上帝“并非不完美”，那么他的行为也必然是完美的。当我们说上帝“并非无知”（意味着他是智慧的）时，我们由此可以推断他完全智慧且无所不知。这种推断只能针对上帝的作为，而不能针对他的本质，因为本质超越了我们理智的范畴。

Yet Maimonides was careful to maintain that God was essentially incomprehensible and inaccessible to human reason. He proved God’s existence by means of the arguments of Aristotle and Ibn Sina but insisted that God remains ineffable and indescribable because of his absolute simplicity. The prophets themselves had used parables and taught us that it was only possible to talk about God in any meaningful or extensive way in symbolic, allusive language. We know that God cannot be compared to any of the things that exist. It is better, therefore, to use negative terminology when we attempt to describe him. Instead of saying that “he exists,” we should deny his nonexistence and so on. As with the Ismailis, the use of the negative language was a discipline that would enhance our appreciation of God’s transcendence, reminding us that the reality was quite distinct from any idea that we poor humans can conceive of him. We cannot even say that God is “good” because he is far more than anything that we can mean by “goodness.” This is a way of excluding our imperfections from God, preventing us from projecting our hopes and desires onto him. That would create a God in our own image and likeness. We can, however, use the Via Negativa to form some positive notions of God. Thus, when we say that God is “not impotent” (instead of saying that he is powerful), it follows logically that God must be able to act. Since God is “not imperfect” his actions must also be perfect. When we say that God is “not ignorant” (meaning that he is wise), we can deduce that he is perfectly wise and fully informed. This kind of deduction can only be made about God’s activities, not about his essence, which remains beyond the reach of our intellect.

当需要在圣经中的上帝和哲学家们所信奉的上帝之间做出选择时，迈蒙尼德总是选择前者。尽管“无中生有”的创造论在哲学上并不正统，迈蒙尼德仍然坚持传统的圣经教义，并摒弃了“流溢”的哲学观念。正如他所指出的，无论是“无中生有”还是“流溢”，都无法仅凭理性得到确凿的证明。此外，他认为预言优于哲学。先知和哲学家谈论的都是同一位上帝，但先知必须具备丰富的想象力和卓越的智力。他对上帝拥有直接的、直觉式的认知，这种认知远高于通过论证推理所获得的认知。迈蒙尼德本人似乎也带有某种神秘主义色彩。他谈到伴随这种对上帝的直觉体验而来的激动之情，这种情感“源于想象力的完美发挥”。²⁰尽管迈蒙尼德强调理性，但他坚持认为，对上帝的最高认识更多地来源于想象力，而不仅仅是智力。

When it came to a choice between the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers, Maimonides always chose the former. Even though the doctrine of the creation ex nihilo was philosophically unorthodox, Maimonides adhered to the traditional biblical doctrine and jettisoned the philosophic idea of emanation. As he pointed out, neither creation ex nihilo nor emanation could be proven definitively by reason alone. Again, he considered prophecy superior to philosophy. Both the prophet and the philosopher spoke about the same God, but the prophet had to be imaginatively as well as intellectually gifted. He had a direct, intuitive knowledge of God which was higher than the knowledge achieved by discursive reasoning. Maimonides seems to have been something of a mystic himself. He speaks of the trembling excitement that accompanied this kind of intuitive experience of God, an emotion “consequent upon the perfection of the imaginative faculties.”²⁰ Despite Maimonides’ emphasis on rationality, he maintained that the highest knowledge of God derived more from the imagination than from the intellect alone.

他的思想在法国南部和西班牙的犹太人中传播开来，到十四世纪初，这一地区已经形成了犹太哲学启蒙运动的雏形。这些犹太哲学家（Faylasuf）中有些人比迈蒙尼德更加理性。例如，法国南部巴尼奥勒的列维·本·格尔松（1288-1344）否认上帝知晓世俗之事。他信奉的是哲学家的上帝，而非《圣经》中的上帝。不可避免地，这种观点引发了反弹。一些犹太人转向神秘主义，发展出卡巴拉的深奥体系，我们将在后文中看到。另一些人在遭遇悲剧时则远离哲学，因为他们发现遥远的哲学之神无法给予他们慰藉。在十三至十四世纪，基督教的收复失地战争开始推进伊斯兰教在西班牙的扩张，并将西欧的反犹主义带到了伊比利亚半岛。最终，这导致了西班牙犹太人的灭绝。在十六世纪，犹太人背离了法尔萨法，发展出一种全新的上帝观念，这种观念受到神话的启发，而不是科学逻辑的启发。

His ideas spread among the Jews of Southern France and Spain, so that by the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was what amounted to a Jewish philosophical enlightenment in the area. Some of these Jewish Faylasufs were more vigorously rationalistic than Maimonides. Thus Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344) of Bagnols in Southern France denied that God had knowledge of mundane affairs. His was the God of the philosophers, not the God of the Bible. Inevitably a reaction set in. Some Jews turned to mysticism and developed the esoteric discipline of Kabbalah, as we shall see. Others recoiled from philosophy when tragedy struck, finding that the remote God of Falsafah was unable to console them. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian Wars of Reconquest began to push back the frontiers of Islam in Spain and brought the anti-Semitism of Western Europe to the peninsula. Eventually this would culminate in the destruction of Spanish Jewry, and during the sixteenth century the Jews turned away from Falsafah and developed an entirely new conception of God that was inspired by mythology rather than scientific logic.

西方基督教的十字军东征使其与其他一神教传统截然不同。1096-1099年的第一次十字军东征是新生的西方世界的第一次合作行动，标志着欧洲开始从被称为“黑暗时代”的漫长野蛮时期中复苏。在北欧基督教国家的支持下，新罗马帝国正努力重返国际舞台。然而，盎格鲁人、撒克逊人和法兰克人的基督教信仰却十分原始。他们生性好战，渴望一种同样具有侵略性的宗教。11世纪，克吕尼修道院及其附属修道院的本笃会修士试图将他们的尚武精神与教会联系起来，并通过朝圣等宗教活动向他们传授真正的基督教价值观。第一批十字军战士将他们远征近东的行动视为前往圣地的朝圣之旅，但他们对上帝和宗教的理解仍然非常原始。像圣乔治、圣墨丘利和圣德米特里这样的圣战士在他们的虔诚信仰中比上帝本身更为重要，实际上与异教神祇并无太大区别。耶稣被视为十字军的封建领主，而非道成肉身的圣神：他召集骑士，从异教徒手中夺回他的领地——圣地。在他们启程之际，一些十字军决心为耶稣之死复仇，屠杀莱茵河谷沿岸的犹太社区。这并非教皇乌尔班二世发起十字军东征的初衷，但对许多十字军而言，跋涉三千英里去与几乎一无所知的穆斯林作战，而那些——至少在他们看来——真正杀害基督的人却安然无恙地生活在他们家门口，这简直荒谬至极。在漫长而艰辛的耶路撒冷进军途中，十字军险些丧命，他们只能以自己是上帝的选民，受到上帝的特殊庇护为由，来解释他们的幸存。上帝正带领他们前往圣地，正如他曾经带领古代以色列人一样。实际上，他们的神仍然是圣经早期篇章中记载的原始部落神。1099年夏天，当他们最终攻占耶路撒冷时，他们像约书亚一样狂热地袭击了城中的犹太人和穆斯林居民，并以令同时代人震惊的残暴手段对他们进行了屠杀。

The crusading religion of Western Christendom had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions. The First Crusade of 1096–99 had been the first cooperative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Ages. The new Rome, backed by the Christian nations of Northern Europe, was fighting its way back onto the international scene. But the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion. During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage. The first Crusaders had seen their expedition to the Near East as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they still had a very primitive conception of God and of religion. Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders rather than as the incarnate Logos: he had summoned his knights to recover his patrimony—the Holy Land—from the infidel. As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. This had not been part of Pope Urban II’s original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had—or so they thought—actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps. During the long terrible march to Jerusalem, when the Crusaders narrowly escaped extinction, they could only account for their survival by assuming that they must be God’s Chosen People, who enjoyed his special protection. He was leading them to the Holy Land as he had once led the ancient Israelites. In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.

此后，欧洲的基督徒视犹太人和穆斯林为上帝的敌人；长期以来，他们也对拜占庭的希腊东正教徒怀有深深的敌意，认为后者让他们觉得自己野蛮低人一等。 ²¹但情况并非一直如此。九世纪时，西方一些受过良好教育的基督徒受到了希腊神学的启发。例如，凯尔特哲学家邓斯·司各脱·埃里根纳（810-877年）离开故乡爱尔兰，前往西法兰克国王查理一世（勇敢者查理）的宫廷任职，他将许多希腊教父的著作翻译成拉丁文，以造福西方基督徒，特别是德尼·阿雷奥帕吉特的著作。他坚信信仰与理性并非相互排斥。如同犹太教和伊斯兰教的费拉苏夫派一样，他将哲学视为通往上帝的康庄大道。柏拉图和亚里士多德是那些要求对基督教进行理性解释的人的导师。圣经和教父的著作可以通过逻辑和理性探究的方法来阐释，但这并不意味着要进行字面解读：某些经文必须以象征意义来解释，因为正如埃里根纳在其《论狄尼的天阶》中所解释的那样，神学“是一种诗歌”。²²

Thenceforth Christians in Europe regarded Jews and Muslims as the enemies of God; for a long time they had also felt a deep antagonism toward the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, who made them feel barbarous and inferior.²¹ This had not always been the case. During the ninth century, some of the more educated Christians of the West had been inspired by Greek theology. Thus the Celtic philosopher Duns Scotus Erigena (810–877), who left his native Ireland to work in the court of Charles the Bold, King of the West Franks, had translated many of the Greek Fathers of the Church into Latin for the benefit of Western Christians, in particular the works of Denys the Areopagite. Erigena passionately believed that faith and reason were not mutually exclusive. Like the Jewish and Muslim Faylasufs, he saw philosophy as the royal road to God. Plato and Aristotle were the masters of those who demanded a rational account of the Christian religion. Scripture and the writings of the Fathers could be illuminated by the disciplines of logic and rational inquiry, but that did not mean a literal interpretation: some passages of scripture had to be interpreted symbolically because, as Erigena explained in his Exposition of Denys’s Celestial Hierarchy, theology was “a kind of poetry.”²²

埃里根纳在讨论上帝时运用了德尼的辩证法，他认为上帝只能用一个悖论来解释，这个悖论提醒我们人类理解的局限性。对上帝的正面和负面解读都是有效的。上帝是不可理解的：即使是天使也无法知晓或理解他的本质，但我们可以做出正面的陈述，例如“上帝是智慧的”，因为当我们用“智慧”来指代上帝时，我们知道我们并非以通常的方式使用这个词。我们通过做出负面的陈述——“上帝不是智慧的”——来提醒自己这一点。这个悖论迫使我们转向德尼关于上帝的第三种论述方式，即得出“上帝超越智慧”的结论。希腊人称之为否定神学的陈述，因为我们无法理解“超越智慧”究竟意味着什么。这不仅仅是一种语言技巧，而是一种通过并置两个相互排斥的陈述来帮助我们培养对“上帝”一词所代表的神秘感的学科，因为它永远不能被局限于一个纯粹的人类概念。

Erigena used the dialectical method of Denys in his own discussion of God, who could only be explained by a paradox that reminded us of the limitations of our human understanding. Both the positive and the negative approaches to God were valid. God is incomprehensible: even the angels do not know or understand his essential nature, but it is acceptable to make a positive statement, such as “God is wise,” because when we refer it to God we know that we are not using the word “wise” in the usual way. We remind ourselves of this by going on to make a negative statement, saying “God is not wise.” The paradox forces us to move on to Denys’s third way of talking about God, when we conclude: “God is more than wise.” This was what the Greeks called an apophatic statement because we do not understand what “more than wise” can possibly mean. Again, this was not simply a verbal trick but a discipline that by juxtaposing two mutually exclusive statements helps us to cultivate a sense of the mystery that our word “God” represents, since it can never be confined to a merely human concept.

当埃里根纳将这种方法应用于“上帝存在”这一陈述时，他一如既往地得出了综合结论：“上帝超越存在。”上帝并非像他所创造的事物那样存在，也并非如德尼所指出的那样，仅仅是与它们并存的另一个存在。这又是一个令人费解的陈述，因为埃里根纳评论道：“它并没有揭示超越‘存在’的究竟是什么。因为它说上帝并非存在之物，而是超越存在之物，但它丝毫没有定义这‘存在’究竟是什么。” ²³事实上，上帝是“虚无”。埃里根纳知道这听起来令人震惊，他告诫读者不要害怕。他设计这种方法是为了提醒我们，上帝并非客体；他并不拥有我们所能理解的任何意义上的“存在”。上帝是“超越存在者”（aliquo modo superesse）。²⁴他的存在方式与我们截然不同，正如我们的存在方式与动物截然不同，动物的存在方式与石头截然不同一样。但如果上帝是“虚无”，他也是“一切”：因为这种“超存在”意味着唯有上帝拥有真正的存在；他是凡有此属性者，皆为之本质。因此，他所创造的每一个生命，都是神显，是上帝临在的标志。埃里根纳的凯尔特式虔诚——体现在圣帕特里克著名的祷文“愿上帝在我心中，在我理解之中”——促使他强调上帝的内在性。在新柏拉图主义的体系中，人自身囊括了整个受造界，是这些神显中最完整的体现。埃里根纳如同奥古斯丁一样教导我们，我们可以在自身之内发现三位一体，尽管如同透过镜子般模糊不清。

When he applied this method to the statement “God exists,” Erigena arrived, as usual, at the synthesis: “God is more than existence.” God does not exist like the things he has created and is not just another being existing alongside them, as Denys had pointed out. Again, this was an incomprehensible statement, because, Erigena comments, “what that is which is more than ‘being’ it does not reveal. For it says that God is not one of the things that are, but that he is more than the things that are, but what that ‘is’ is, it in no way defines.”²³ In fact, God is “Nothing.” Erigena knew that this sounded shocking and he warned his reader not to be afraid. His method was devised to remind us that God is not an object; he does not possess “being” in any sense that we can comprehend. God is “He who is more than being” (aliquo modo superesse).²⁴ His mode of existence is as different from ours as our being is from an animal’s and an animal’s from a rock. But if God is “Nothing” he is also “Everything”: because this “super-existence” means that God alone has true being; he is the essence of everything that partakes of this. Every one of his creatures, therefore, is a theophany, a sign of God’s presence. Erigena’s Celtic piety—encapsulated in St. Patrick’s famous prayer: “God be in my head and in my understanding”—led him to emphasize the immanence of God. Man, who in the Neoplatonic scheme sums up the whole of creation in himself, is the most complete of these theophanies, and, like Augustine, Erigena taught that we can discover a trinity within ourselves, albeit in a glass darkly.

在埃里根纳的悖论神学中，上帝既是万物又是虚无；这两个概念彼此平衡，并处于一种创造性的张力之中，以此暗示着我们用“上帝”一词所能象征的奥秘。因此，当一位学生问他德尼称上帝为虚无是什么意思时，埃里根纳回答说，神圣的善是不可理解的，因为它“超本质”——也就是说，它超越了善本身——并且是“超自然的”。

In Erigena’s paradoxical theology, God is both Everything and Nothing; the two terms balance one another and are held in a creative tension to suggest the mystery which our word “God” can only symbolize. Thus when a student asks him what Denys meant when he called God Nothing, Erigena replies that the divine Goodness is incomprehensible because it is “superessential”—that is, more than Goodness itself—and “supernatural.” So

因此，当我们审视神圣实在本身时，“称其为‘虚无’并非毫无道理”，但当这神圣的虚空决定“从虚无变为有”时，它所赋予的每一个受造物“都可以被称为神显，即神圣的显现”。 ²⁶我们无法看到神本身，因为这位神实际上并不存在。我们所看到的只是赋予受造世界生命、并在花草树木和人类身上显现的神。这种方法存在一些问题。那么邪恶呢？正如印度教徒所认为的那样，邪恶也是神在世间的显现吗？埃里根纳并没有对邪恶的问题进行足够深入的探讨，但犹太卡巴拉学者后来试图在神内部寻找邪恶的根源：他们也发展出一种神学，描述神从虚无变为有，这与埃里根纳的描述惊人地相似，尽管卡巴拉学者不太可能读过他的著作。

When, therefore, we consider the divine reality in itself, “it is not unreasonably called ‘Nothing,’ ” but when this divine Void decides to proceed “out of Nothing into Something,” every single creature it informs “can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition.”²⁶ We cannot see God as he is in himself since this God to all intents and purposes does not exist. We only see the God which animates the created world and reveals himself in flowers, birds, trees and other human beings. There are problems in this approach. What about evil? Is this, as Hindus maintain, also a manifestation of God in the world? Erigena does not attempt to deal with the problem of evil in sufficient depth, but Jewish Kabbalists would later attempt to locate evil within God: they also developed a theology that described God proceeding from Nothingness to become Something in a way that is remarkably similar to Erigena’s account, though it is highly unlikely that any of the Kabbalists had read him.

埃里根纳的研究表明，拉丁人可以从希腊人身上学到很多东西，但在1054年，东西方教会断绝了关系，这场分裂最终演变成永久性的——尽管当时没有人预料到这种情况。这场冲突具有政治层面，我在此不做赘述。讨论的焦点在于三位一体的争论。796年，西方主教会议在法国南部弗雷瑞斯召开，并在尼西亚信经中加入了一条附加条款。该条款指出，圣灵不仅源于圣父，也源于圣子（filioque）。拉丁主教们希望强调圣父与圣子的平等，因为他们的一些信众持有阿里乌教派的观点。他们认为，圣灵既源于圣父也源于圣子，就能凸显圣父与圣子的平等地位。尽管即将成为西方皇帝的查理曼大帝对神学问题一无所知，但他还是批准了这条新条款。然而，希腊人对此予以谴责。但拉丁人坚持己见，坚称他们的教父们也曾教导过这一教义。例如，圣奥古斯丁就认为圣灵是三位一体中合一的原则，认为圣灵是圣父与圣子之间的爱。因此，说圣灵是从他们二人而出是正确的，而新的条款强调了三位一体的本质统一性。

Erigena showed that the Latins had much to learn from the Greeks, but in 1054 Eastern and Western Churches broke off relations in a schism which has turned out to be permanent—though at the time nobody intended this. The conflict had a political dimension, which I shall not discuss, but it also centered on a dispute about the Trinity. In 796 a synod of Western bishops had met at Fréjus in Southern France and had inserted an extra clause into the Nicene Creed. This stated that the Holy Spirit proceeded not only from the Father but also from the Son (filioque). The Latin bishops wanted to emphasize the equality of the Father and the Son, since some of their flock harbored Arian views. Making the Spirit proceed from both the Father and the Son, they thought, would stress their equal status. Even though Charlemagne, soon to become Emperor of the West, had absolutely no understanding of the theological issues, he approved the new clause. The Greeks, however, condemned it. Yet the Latins held firm and insisted that their own Fathers had taught this doctrine. Thus St. Augustine had seen the Holy Spirit as the principle of unity in the Trinity, maintaining that he was the love between Father and Son. It was, therefore, correct to say that the Spirit had proceeded from them both, and the new clause stressed the essential unity of the three persons.

但希腊人一直对奥古斯丁的三位一体神学抱有怀疑，因为它过于拟人化。西方从上帝的统一性出发，进而探讨这一统一性中的三个位格，而希腊人则始终从三个位格出发，并宣称上帝的统一性——即他的本质——超越了我们的理解。他们认为拉丁人将三位一体解释得过于浅显易懂，并且怀疑拉丁语无法足够精确地表达这些三位一体的思想。“圣灵由圣父和圣子发出”（filioque）这一前提过分强调了三个位格的统一性，希腊人认为，这一补充非但没有暗示上帝本质上的不可理解性，反而使三位一体显得过于理性。它将上帝描绘成一个拥有三种面向或存在方式的个体。事实上，拉丁人的这一论断本身并无异端之处，尽管它与希腊人的否定神学精神不符。如果双方都渴望和平，这场冲突或许可以化解。然而，十字军东征期间，东西方之间的紧张关系不断升级，尤其是在1204年第四次十字军攻陷拜占庭首都君士坦丁堡，重创希腊帝国之后。圣灵由圣父和圣子发出（圣灵由圣父和圣子发出）的教义分歧揭示了希腊人和拉丁人对上帝的理解截然不同。三位一体在西方灵性中的地位，远不及它在希腊人心中的地位。希腊人认为，西方如此强调上帝的合一性，实际上是将上帝本身等同于一个可以被定义和讨论的“简单本质”，就像哲学家们所说的上帝一样。²⁷在后面的章节中，我们将看到，西方基督徒常常对三位一体的教义感到不安，而且在……到了十八世纪启蒙运动时期，许多人会彻底放弃三位一体论。实际上，许多西方基督徒并非真正的三位一体论者。他们抱怨三位一体的教义难以理解，却没意识到这正是古希腊人理解三位一体论的关键所在。

But the Greeks had always distrusted Augustine’s Trinitarian theology, because it was too anthropomorphic. Where the West began with the notion of God’s unity and then considered the three persons within that unity, the Greeks had always started with the three hypostases and declared that God’s unity—his essence—was beyond our ken. They thought that the Latins made the Trinity too comprehensible, and they also suspected that the Latin language was not able to express these Trinitarian ideas with sufficient precision. The filioque clause overemphasized the unity of the three persons and, the Greeks argued, instead of hinting at the essential incomprehensibility of God, the addition made the Trinity too rational. It made God one with three aspects or modes of being. In fact there was nothing heretical about the Latin assertion, even though it did not suit the Greeks’ apophatic spirituality. The conflict could have been patched up if there had been a will for peace, but tension between East and West escalated during the Crusades, especially when the fourth Crusaders sacked the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1204 and fatally wounded the Greek empire. What the filioque rift had revealed was that the Greeks and Latins were evolving quite different conceptions of God. The Trinity had never been as central to Western spirituality as it has remained for the Greeks. The Greeks felt that by emphasizing the unity of God in this way, the West was identifying God himself with a “simple essence” that could be defined and discussed, like the God of the Philosophers.²⁷ In later chapters we shall see that Western Christians were frequently uneasy about the doctrine of the Trinity and that, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, many would drop it altogether. To all intents and purposes, many Western Christians are not really Trinitarians. They complain that the doctrine of Three Persons in One God is incomprehensible, not realizing that for the Greeks that was the whole point.

分裂之后，希腊人和拉丁人走上了不同的道路。在希腊东正教中，神学（theologia），即对上帝的研究，仍然保持着其本质。它仅限于对三位一体和道成肉身这些本质上神秘的教义中上帝的默想。他们认为“恩典神学”或“家庭神学”的概念自相矛盾：他们对次要问题的理论探讨和定义并不特别感兴趣。然而，西方却越来越关注这些问题的定义，并试图形成一个对所有人都有约束力的正确观点。例如，宗教改革使基督教世界进一步分裂成敌对阵营，因为天主教徒和新教徒无法就救赎的机制以及圣餐的确切含义达成一致。西方基督徒不断挑战希腊人，要求他们就这些争议性问题发表意见，但希腊人反应迟缓，即使回应，他们的回答也常常显得杂乱无章。他们开始对理性主义抱有怀疑，认为它不适用于探讨一位必须超越概念和逻辑的神。形而上学在世俗研究中尚可接受，但越来越多的希腊人感到它会危及信仰。形而上学迎合了人们思维中更健谈、更活跃的部分，而他们的“理论”（toria）并非一种理性的观点，而是一种在神面前的自律沉默，因为神只能通过宗教和神秘体验来认识。1082年，哲学家兼人文主义者约翰·伊塔洛斯（John Italos）因过度运用哲学及其新柏拉图主义的创世观而被控异端。就在安萨里（al-Ghazzali）于巴格达精神崩溃并放弃卡拉姆（Kalam，希腊语，意为“教义”）成为苏菲派信徒之前不久，他便刻意远离了哲学。

After the schism, Greeks and Latins took divergent paths. In Greek Orthodoxy, theologia, the study of God, remained precisely that. It was confined to the contemplation of God in the essentially mystical doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. They would find the idea of a “theology of grace” or a “theology of the family” contradictions in terms: they were not particularly interested in theoretical discussions and definitions of secondary issues. The West, however, was increasingly concerned to define these questions and to form a correct opinion that was binding on everybody. The Reformation, for example, divided Christendom into yet more warring camps because Catholics and Protestants could not agree on the mechanics of how salvation happened and exactly what the Eucharist was. Western Christians continually challenged the Greeks to give their opinion on these contentious issues, but the Greeks lagged behind and, if they did reply, their answer frequently sounded rather cobbled together. They had become distrustful of rationalism, finding it an inappropriate tool for the discussion of a God who must elude concepts and logic. Metaphysics was acceptable in secular studies, but increasingly Greeks felt that it could endanger the faith. It appealed to the more talkative, busy part of the mind, whereas their theoria was not an intellectual opinion but a disciplined silence before the God who could only be known by means of religious and mystical experience. In 1082, the philosopher and humanist John Italos was tried for heresy because of his excessive use of philosophy and his Neoplatonic conception of creation. This deliberate withdrawal from philosophy happened shortly before al-Ghazzali had his breakdown in Baghdad and quit Kalam in order to become a Sufi.

因此，颇具讽刺意味的是，西方基督徒开始深入研究哲学（Falsafah）之时，恰恰是希腊人和穆斯林开始对哲学失去信心之时。中世纪黑暗时期，柏拉图和亚里士多德的著作尚未以拉丁文流传，西方自然而然地落后了。哲学的发现令人振奋，激动人心。我们在第四章讨论过的十一世纪神学家坎特伯雷的安瑟伦，似乎认为任何事都有可能被证明。他的上帝并非虚无，而是至高无上的存在。即使是无神论者也能对至高无上的存在形成概念。祂认为，上帝是“唯一的本性，是万物之首，祂自身就拥有永恒的福乐”。 ²⁸然而，他也坚持认为，唯有凭着信仰才能认识上帝。这并非如表面看起来那样自相矛盾。在他著名的祷文中，安瑟伦引用了以赛亚的话：“你们若没有信心，就不能明白。”

It is, therefore, poignant and ironic that Western Christians should have begun to get down to Falsafah at the precise moment when Greeks and Muslims were starting to lose faith in it. Plato and Aristotle had not been available in Latin during the Dark Ages, so inevitably the West had been left behind. The discovery of philosophy was stimulating and exciting. The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury, whose views on the Incarnation we discussed in Chapter 4, seemed to think that it was possible to prove anything. His God was not Nothing but the highest being of all. Even the unbeliever could form an idea of a supreme being, which was “one nature, highest of all the things that are, alone sufficient unto itself in eternal beatitude.”²⁸ Yet he also insisted that God could only be known in faith. This is not as paradoxical as it might appear. In his famous prayer, Anselm reflected on the words of Isaiah: “Unless you have faith, you will not understand”:

常被引用的“credo ut intellegam”并非一种放弃理性的姿态。安瑟伦并非声称要盲目地接受信条，寄希望于有朝一日能领悟其真谛。他的断言更恰当的翻译应该是：“我全身心投入，以便能够理解。”当时，“ credo ”一词尚未像今天“信仰”一词那样带有理性的色彩，而是指一种信任和忠诚的态度。值得注意的是，即使在西方理性主义的萌芽时期，对上帝的宗教体验仍然占据首要地位，先于讨论或逻辑理解。

The oft-quoted credo ut intellegam is not an intellectual abdication. Anselm was not claiming to embrace the creed blindly in the hope of its making sense some day. His assertion should really be translated: “I commit myself in order that I may understand.” At this time, the word credo still did not have the intellectual bias of the word “belief” today but meant an attitude of trust and loyalty. It is important to note that even in the first flush of Western rationalism, the religious experience of God remained primary, coming before discussion or logical understanding.

然而，与穆斯林和犹太教的费拉苏夫派一样，安瑟伦也相信上帝的存在可以用理性论证，并设计了自己的证明，通常被称为“本体论”论证。安瑟伦将上帝定义为“不可想象之物”（aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit）。 ³⁰由于这意味着上帝可以成为思想的对象，因此也意味着上帝可以被人类的思维所构想和理解。安瑟伦认为，这个“存在”必然存在。因为存在比不存在更“完美”或更完整，所以我们想象中的完美存在必然存在，否则它就是不完美的。在柏拉图思想盛行的时代，人们相信观念指向永恒的原型，安瑟伦的证明可谓巧妙而有效。但在今天，它恐怕难以说服怀疑论者。正如英国神学家约翰·麦奎里所言，你或许想象自己有100美元，但遗憾的是，这并不会让这笔钱真正落入你的口袋^。31

Nevertheless, like the Muslim and Jewish Faylasufs, Anselm believed that the existence of God could be argued rationally, and he devised his own proof, which is usually called the “ontological” argument. Anselm defined God as “something than which nothing greater can be thought” (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit).³⁰ Since this implied that God could be an object of thought, the implication was that he could be conceived and comprehended by the human mind. Anselm argued that this Something must exist. Since existence is more “perfect” or complete than nonexistence, the perfect being that we imagine must have existence or it would be imperfect. Anselm’s proof was ingenious and effective in a world dominated by Platonic thought, where ideas were believed to point to eternal archetypes. It is unlikely to convince a skeptic today. As the British theologian John Macquarrie has remarked, you may imagine that you have $100, but unfortunately that will not make the money a reality in your pocket.³¹

因此，安瑟伦的上帝是存在，而非德尼和埃里根纳所描述的虚无。安瑟伦愿意以比大多数前人更为积极的措辞来谈论上帝。他并未提倡否定之路的修行，而是似乎认为可以通过自然理性来获得一个相当充分的上帝观念，而这恰恰是希腊人一直以来对西方世界感到困惑的地方。神学。安瑟伦在确信上帝的存在之后，便着手论证道成肉身和三位一体的教义，而希腊人一直坚称这些教义违背理性与概念。在他那篇我们在第四章讨论过的著作《上帝为何成为人》中，他更多地依赖逻辑和理性思维，而非启示——他对《圣经》和教父著作的引用似乎纯粹是为论证主旨服务的附带，正如我们所见，他的论证本质上赋予了上帝以人类的动机。他并非唯一一位试图用理性解释上帝奥秘的西方基督徒。与他同时代的巴黎魅力哲学家彼得·阿伯拉尔（1079-1147）也发展出一套关于三位一体的解释，这套解释在某种程度上强调了神圣的统一性，而忽略了三个位格的区分。他还为赎罪的奥秘提出了一套精妙而感人的理论：基督被钉十字架是为了唤醒我们心中的怜悯之心，并因此成为我们的救主。

Anselm’s God was Being, therefore, not the Nothing described by Denys and Erigena. Anselm was willing to speak about God in far more positive terms than most of the previous Faylasufs. He did not propose the discipline of a Via Negativa but seemed to think it possible to arrive at a fairly adequate idea of God by means of natural reason, which was precisely what had always troubled the Greeks about the Western theology. Once he had proved God’s existence to his satisfaction, Anselm set out to demonstrate the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, which the Greeks had always insisted defied reason and conceptualization. In his treatise Why God Became Man, which we considered in Chapter 4, he relies on logic and rational thought more than revelation—his quotations from the Bible and the Fathers seem purely incidental to the thrust of his argument, which, as we saw, ascribed essentially human motivation to God. He was not the only Western Christian to try to explain the mystery of God in rational terms. His contemporary Peter Abelard (1079–1147), the charismatic philosopher of Paris, had also evolved an explanation of the Trinity which emphasized the divine unity somewhat at the expense of the distinction of the Three Persons. He also developed a sophisticated and moving rationale for the mystery of the atonement: Christ had been crucified to awaken compassion in us and by doing so he became our Savior.

阿伯拉尔主要是一位哲学家，他的神学观点通常较为传统。他曾是十二世纪欧洲思想复兴运动的领军人物，并拥有众多追随者。这使他与勃艮第克莱尔沃熙笃会修道院魅力非凡的院长伯纳德产生了冲突，伯纳德堪称当时欧洲最有权势的人物。教皇尤金二世和法国国王路易七世都受伯纳德的庇护，他的雄辩之才激发了欧洲的一场修道革命：无数青年离家追随他加入熙笃会，该修会致力于改革克吕尼派的旧式本笃会宗教生活。 1146年，当伯纳德宣讲第二次十字军东征时，此前对这场远征略显冷漠的法国和德国民众，几乎被这股热情撕成了碎片，蜂拥而至加入军队，人数之多，以至于伯纳德得意洋洋地写信给教皇，乡村仿佛空无一人。伯纳德是一位睿智之人，他赋予了西欧略显外在的虔诚以新的内在维度。熙笃会的虔诚似乎影响了圣杯传说，该传说描述了一段通往一座象征性城市的灵性之旅，这座城市不属于尘世，而是代表着上帝的显现。然而，伯纳德对阿伯拉尔这类学者的理性主义深感怀疑，并誓言要让他噤声。他指责阿伯拉尔“妄图凭借人类理性理解上帝的一切，从而企图否定基督教信仰的价值”。³²伯纳德援引圣保罗的博爱颂，声称这位哲学家缺乏基督之爱：“他视万物非谜，视万物非镜，而是视而不见。”一切都要当面谈。” ³³因此，爱情与理性的运用是水火不容的。1141年，伯纳德召集阿伯拉尔出席桑斯会议，他安排自己的支持者挤满了会议室，其中一些人甚至在阿伯拉尔到达时站在外面恐吓他。这并不难做到，因为此时阿伯拉尔很可能已经患上了帕金森病。伯纳德的辩词如此雄辩，以至于阿伯拉尔当即倒地身亡，并于次年去世。

Abelard was primarily a philosopher, however, and his theology was usually rather conventional. He had become a leading figure in the intellectual revival in Europe during the twelfth century and had acquired a huge following. This had brought him into conflict with Bernard, the charismatic abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Clairvaux in Burgundy, who was arguably the most powerful man in Europe. Pope Eugene II and King Louis VII of France were both in Bernard’s pocket, and his eloquence had inspired a monastic revolution in Europe: scores of young men had left their homes to follow him into the Cistercian order, which sought to reform the old Cluniac form of Benedictine religious life. When Bernard preached the Second Crusade in 1146, the people of France and Germany—who had previously been somewhat apathetic about the expedition—almost tore him to pieces in their enthusiasm, flocking to join the army in such numbers that, Bernard complacently wrote to the Pope, the countryside seemed deserted. Bernard was an intelligent man, who had given the rather external piety of Western Europe a new interior dimension. Cistercian piety seems to have influenced the legend of the Holy Grail, which describes a spiritual journey to a symbolic city that is not of this world but which represents the vision of God. Bernard heartily distrusted the intellectualism of scholars like Abelard, however, and vowed to silence him. He accused Abelard of “attempting to bring the merit of the Christian faith to naught because he supposes that by human reason he can comprehend all that is God.”³² Referring to St. Paul’s hymn to charity, Bernard claimed that the philosopher was lacking in Christian love: “He sees nothing as an enigma, nothing as in a mirror, but looks on everything face to face.”³³ Love and the exercise of reason, therefore, were incompatible. In 1141 Bernard summoned Abelard to appear before the Council of Sens, which he packed with his own supporters, some of whom stood outside to intimidate Abelard when he arrived. That was not difficult to do since, by this time, Abelard had probably developed Parkinson’s disease. Bernard attacked him with such eloquence that he simply collapsed and died the following year.

这是一个具有象征意义的时刻，标志着理智与情感的分裂。在奥古斯丁的三位一体论中，心智与情感密不可分。伊本·西那和安萨里等穆斯林哲学家或许认为仅凭理智无法找到上帝，但他们最终都构想出一种以爱的理想和神秘主义的修行为基础的哲学。我们将看到，在十二至十三世纪，伊斯兰世界的主要思想家试图融合理智与情感，并将哲学视为与苏菲派所倡导的爱与想象的灵性密不可分。然而，伯纳德似乎对理智心存畏惧，并试图将其与更具情感和直觉的思维部分割裂开来。这很危险：它可能导致一种不健康的感性分离，这种分离本身与枯燥的理性主义一样令人担忧。伯纳德所宣扬的十字军东征之所以以失败告终，部分原因在于它依赖于一种缺乏常识约束的理想主义，并且公然否定了基督教的慈悲精神。 ³⁴因此，伯纳德对待阿伯拉尔的方式明显缺乏仁慈，他曾敦促十字军战士通过杀戮异教徒并将他们驱逐出圣地来表达对基督的爱。伯纳德担心理性主义试图解释上帝的奥秘，并有可能削弱宗教的敬畏和惊奇之感，这种担忧不无道理；然而，不受约束的主观性若不批判性地审视自身的偏见，则可能导致宗教最严重的极端。我们需要的是一种有见识且理智的主观性，而不是一种“爱”的情感主义，后者会暴力地压制理智，并抛弃本应是上帝宗教标志的慈悲之心。

It was a symbolic moment, which marked a split between mind and heart. In the Trinitarianism of Augustine, heart and mind had been inseparable. Muslim Faylasufs such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali may have decided that the intellect alone could not find God, but they had both eventually envisaged a philosophy which was informed by the ideal of love and by the disciplines of mysticism. We shall see that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the major thinkers of the Islamic world attempted to fuse mind and heart and saw philosophy as inseparable from the spirituality of love and imagination promoted by the Sufis. Bernard, however, seemed afraid of the intellect and wanted to keep it separate from the more emotional, intuitive parts of the mind. This was dangerous: it could lead to an unhealthy dissociation of sensibility that was in its own way just as worrying as an arid rationalism. The Crusade preached by Bernard was a disaster partly because it relied on an idealism that was untempered by common sense and was in flagrant denial of the Christian ethos of compassion.³⁴ Thus Bernard’s treatment of Abelard was conspicuously lacking in charity, and he had urged the Crusaders to show their love for Christ by killing the infidels, and driving them out of the Holy Land. Bernard was right to fear a rationalism that attempted to explain the mystery of God and threatened to dilute the religious sense of awe and wonder, but unbridled subjectivity that fails to examine its prejudices critically can lead to the worst excesses of religion. What was required was an informed and intelligent subjectivity, not an emotionalism of “love,” which represses the intellect violently and abandons the compassion which was supposed to be the hallmark of the religion of God.

很少有思想家能像托马斯·阿奎那（1225-1274）那样对西方基督教做出如此深远的贡献。他试图将奥古斯丁的思想与当时刚刚传入西方的希腊哲学进行融合。十二世纪，欧洲学者涌向西班牙，在那里接触到了穆斯林学术。在穆斯林和犹太知识分子的帮助下，他们开展了一项庞大的翻译工程，将这些丰富的知识财富带到西方。柏拉图、亚里士多德以及其他古代哲学家的阿拉伯语译本……如今，这部著作被译成拉丁文，首次为北欧人民所熟知。译者们还研究了近代穆斯林的学术成果，包括伊本·鲁什德的著作以及阿拉伯科学家和医生的发现。与此同时，一些欧洲基督徒一心想要摧毁近东的伊斯兰教，而西班牙的穆斯林却在帮助西方建立起自己的文明。托马斯·阿奎那的《神学大全》正是试图将新哲学与西方基督教传统相融合。阿奎那尤其欣赏伊本·鲁什德对亚里士多德的阐释。然而，与安瑟伦和阿伯拉尔不同，他并不认为三位一体之类的奥秘能够被理性证明，并且他仔细区分了上帝不可言喻的实在与人类关于上帝的教义。他同意德尼的观点，认为上帝的真正本质是人类心智无法企及的：“因此，归根结底，人对上帝的认识仅限于知道自己并不认识上帝，因为他知道上帝的本质远超我们所能理解的一切。” ³⁵据说，当阿奎那口述完《神学大全》的最后一句话后，他悲伤地将头埋在臂弯里。当抄写员问他怎么了时，他回答说，与他所看到的相比，他所写的一切都如同稻草一般。

Few thinkers have made such a lasting contribution to Western Christianity as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who attempted a synthesis of Augustine and the Greek philosophy which had recently been made available in the West. During the twelfth century, European scholars had flocked to Spain, where they encountered Muslim scholarship. With the help of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals they undertook a vast translation project to bring this intellectual wealth to the West. Arabic translations of Plato, Aristotle and the other philosophers of the ancient world were now translated into Latin and became available to the people of Northern Europe for the first time. The translators also worked on more recent Muslim scholarship, including the work of Ibn Rushd as well as the discoveries of Arab scientists and physicians. At the same time as some European Christians were bent on the destruction of Islam in the Near East, Muslims in Spain were helping the West to build up its own civilization. The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas was an attempt to integrate the new philosophy with the Western Christian tradition. Aquinas had been particularly impressed by Ibn Rushd’s explication of Aristotle. Yet, unlike Anselm and Abelard, he did not believe that such mysteries as the Trinity could be proved by reason and distinguished carefully between the ineffable reality of God and human doctrines about him. He agreed with Denys that God’s real nature was inaccessible to the human mind: “Hence in the last resort all that man knows of God is to know that he does not know him, since he knows that what God is surpasses all that we can understand of him.”³⁵ There is a story that when he had dictated the last sentence of the Summa, Aquinas laid his head sadly on his arms. When the scribe asked him what was the matter, he replied that everything that he had written was straw compared with what he had seen.

阿奎那试图将他的宗教体验置于新哲学的语境中，这对于将信仰与其他现实联系起来，而不是将其置于孤立的领域至关重要。过度理性化会损害信仰，但如果上帝不想沦为我们自我中心主义的纵容，宗教体验就必须建立在对其内容的准确评估之上。阿奎那通过回归上帝对摩西的自我定义来定义上帝：“我是自有永有的”。亚里士多德曾说上帝是必然存在；因此，阿奎那将哲学家们的上帝与圣经中的上帝联系起来，称上帝为“自有永有者”（Qui est）。然而，他明确指出，上帝并非像我们一样的另一种存在。将上帝定义为“存在本身”是恰当的，“因为它指的不是任何特定的存在形式，而是存在本身（esse seipsum）。” ³⁶将后来在西方盛行的理性主义上帝观归咎于阿奎那是不正确的。

Aquinas’s attempt to set his religious experience in the context of the new philosophy was necessary in order to articulate faith with other reality and not relegate it to an isolated sphere of its own. Excessive intellectualism is damaging to the faith, but if God is not to become an indulgent endorsement of our own egotism, religious experience must be informed by an accurate assessment of its content. Aquinas defined God by returning to God’s own definition of himself to Moses: “I am What I Am.” Aristotle had said that God was Necessary Being; Aquinas accordingly linked the God of the Philosophers with the God of the Bible by calling God “He Who Is” (Qui est). He made it absolutely clear that God was not simply another being like ourselves, however. The definition of God as Being Itself was appropriate “because it does not signify any particular form [of being] but rather being itself (esse seipsum).”³⁶ It would be incorrect to blame Aquinas for the rationalistic view of God that later prevailed in the West.

然而，不幸的是，阿奎那在论述上帝之前，先从自然哲学的角度论证了上帝的存在，这给人一种错觉，仿佛我们可以用讨论其他哲学思想或自然现象的方式来讨论上帝。这暗示着我们可以用认识其他世俗事物的方式来认识上帝。阿奎那列出了五条证明上帝存在的“证据”，这些证据在天主教世界变得极其重要，也被新教徒所采用：

Unfortunately, however, Aquinas gives the impression that God can be discussed in the same way as other philosophical ideas or natural phenomena by prefacing his discussion of God with a demonstration of God’s existence from natural philosophy. This suggests that we can get to know God in much the same way as other mundane realities. Aquinas lists five “proofs” for God’s existence that would become immensely important in the Catholic world and would also be used by Protestants:

1. 亚里士多德关于第一推动者的论证。
2. Aristotle’s argument for a Prime Mover.
3. 类似的“证明”认为不可能存在无限多的原因：必然有一个开始。
4. A similar “proof” which maintains that there cannot be an infinite series of causes: there must have been a beginning.
5. 伊本·西那提出的偶然性论证要求存在一个“必然存在者”。
6. The argument from contingency, propounded by Ibn Sina, which demands the existence of a “Necessary Being.”
7. 亚里士多德在《哲学论》中论证，这个世界上的卓越等级意味着存在一种至高无上的完美。
8. Aristotle’s argument from the Philosophy that the hierarchy of excellence in this world implies a Perfection that is the best of all.
9. 设计论认为，我们在宇宙中看到的秩序和目的不可能仅仅是偶然的结果。
10. The argument from design, which maintains that the order and purpose that we see in the universe cannot simply be the result of chance.

这些论证在今天站不住脚。即使从宗教角度来看，它们也相当可疑，因为除了设计论证之外，每一种论证都暗含着“上帝”仅仅是另一个存在，是存在链条中的又一个环节。他是至高无上的存在，是必然存在的，是至善至美的存在。诚然，使用“第一因”或“必然存在”之类的术语意味着上帝不可能与我们所知的任何存在相似，而只能是它们存在的基础或条件。这无疑是阿奎那的本意。然而，《神学大全》的读者并非总是能区分这一点，他们谈论上帝时，仿佛他仅仅是至高无上的存在。这种观点过于简化，可能会将这位至高无上的存在变成偶像，按照我们的形象创造出来，并很容易被转化为天上的超我。或许可以说，许多西方人正是以这种方式看待上帝的。

These proofs do not hold water today. Even from a religious point of view, they are rather dubious, since, with the possible exception of the argument from design, each proof tacitly implies that “God” is simply an-other being, one more link in the chain of existence. He is the Supreme Being, the Necessary Being, the Most Perfect Being. Now, it is true that the use of such terms as “First Cause” or “Necessary Being” implies that God cannot be anything like the beings we know but rather their ground or the condition for their existence. This was certainly Aquinas’s intention. Nevertheless, readers of the Summa have not always made this important distinction and have talked about God as if he were simply the Highest Being of all. This is reductive and can make this Super Being an idol, created in our own image and easily turned into a celestial Super Ego. It is probably not inaccurate to suggest that many people in the West regard God as a Being in this way.

将上帝与当时欧洲兴起的亚里士多德主义潮流联系起来至关重要。费拉苏夫家族也一直渴望上帝的概念能够与时俱进，而不是被边缘化。每一代人都需要重新创造关于上帝的观念和体验。然而，大多数穆斯林——可以说——已经用脚投票，他们认为亚里士多德对上帝的研究贡献不大，尽管他在其他领域，例如自然科学，贡献卓著。我们已经看到，亚里士多德关于上帝本质的论述被他的著作编辑称为“后物理学” （ meta ta physica）：他笔下的上帝仅仅是物理现实的延续，而非一个完全不同层次的现实。在穆斯林世界，因此，后世对上帝的大多数讨论都融合了哲学与神秘主义。单凭理性无法对我们称之为“上帝”的现实达成宗教式的理解，但宗教体验需要哲学的批判性智慧和严谨性来指导，否则就会沦为混乱、放纵甚至危险的情感。

It was important to try to link God with the new vogue for Aristotelianism in Europe. The Faylasufs had also been anxious that the idea of God should keep abreast of the times and not be relegated to an archaic ghetto. In each generation, the idea and experience of God would have to be created anew. Most Muslims, however, had—so to speak—voted with their feet and decided that Aristotle did not have much to contribute to the study of God, though he was immensely useful in other spheres, such as natural science. We have seen that Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of God had been dubbed meta ta physica (“After the Physics”) by the editor of his work: his God had simply been a continuation of physical reality rather than a reality of a totally different order. In the Muslim world, therefore, most future discussion of God blended philosophy with mysticism. Reason alone could not reach a religious understanding of the reality we call “God,” but religious experience needed to be informed by the critical intelligence and discipline of philosophy if it were not to become messy, indulgent—or even dangerous—emotion.

阿奎那的同代方济会修士博纳文图拉（1217-1274）也持有类似的观点。他也试图将哲学与宗教经验结合起来，使二者相互促进、相辅相成。在《三重道》中，他追随奥古斯丁的脚步，认为“三位一体”无处不在，并将这种“自然三位一体论”作为其著作《心灵之旅》的出发点。他真诚地相信，三位一体可以通过纯粹的自然理性来证明，但他强调灵性经验作为上帝观念的重要组成部分，从而避免了理性主义沙文主义的危险。他视其修会创始人亚西西的方济为基督徒生活的伟大典范。通过考察方济的生平事迹，像他这样的神学家可以从中找到支持教会教义的证据。托斯卡纳诗人但丁·阿利吉耶里（1265–1321）也发现，一个普通人——在但丁的例子中是佛罗伦萨女子贝娅特丽丝·波尔蒂纳里——可以成为神性的显现。这种人格化的上帝观可以追溯到圣奥古斯丁。

Aquinas’s Franciscan contemporary Bonaventure (1217–74) had much the same vision. He also tried to articulate philosophy with religious experience to the mutual enrichment of both spheres. In The Threefold Way, he had followed Augustine in seeing “trinities” everywhere in creation and took this “natural trinitarianism” as his starting point in The Journey of the Mind to God. He genuinely believed that the Trinity could be proved by unaided natural reason but avoided the dangers of rationalist chauvinism by stressing the importance of spiritual experience as an essential component of the idea of God. He took Francis of Assisi, the founder of his order, as the great exemplar of the Christian life. By looking at the events of his life, a theologian such as himself could find evidence for the doctrines of the Church. The Tuscan poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) would also find that a fellow human being—in Dante’s case the Florentine woman Beatrice Portinari—could be an epiphany of the divine. This personalistic approach to God looked back to St. Augustine.

博纳文图拉也将安瑟伦关于上帝存在的本体论证明应用于他对方济作为显现的论述。他认为，方济在今生达到了一种超越人类的卓越境界，因此，我们这些仍生活在尘世的人，也能够“看到并理解‘至善’……是无法想象的至善之物”。 ³⁷ 我们能够形成“至善”这样的概念，恰恰证明了它必定存在于上帝的至高完美之中。如果我们像柏拉图和奥古斯丁所建议的那样，深入自身，就会发现上帝的形象“映照在我们自己的内心世界”。 ³⁸这种内省至关重要。当然，参与教会的礼仪固然重要，但基督徒首先必须深入到自己的内心深处，在那里，他将“超越理智的狂喜之中”，并找到一种超越我们有限的人类观念的上帝景象。 ³⁹

Bonaventure also applied Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God to his discussion of Francis as an epiphany. He argued that Francis had achieved an excellence in this life that seemed more than human, so it was possible for us, while still living here below, to “see and understand that the ‘best’ is … that than which nothing better can be imagined.”³⁷ The very fact that we could form such a concept as “the best” proved that it must exist in the Supreme Perfection of God. If we entered into ourselves, as Plato and Augustine had both advised, we would find God’s image reflected “in our own inner world.”³⁸ This introspection was essential. It was, of course, important to take part in the liturgy of the Church, but the Christian must first descend into the depths of his own self, where he would be “transported in ecstasy above the intellect” and find a vision of God that transcended our limited human notions.³⁹

博纳文图拉和阿奎那都将宗教体验视为首要的。他们忠实于哲学（Falsafah）的传统，因为在犹太教和伊斯兰教中，哲学家往往是神秘主义者，他们敏锐地意识到理智在神学问题上的局限性。他们发展出上帝存在的理性证明，以阐明他们的宗教信仰与科学研究之间的关系，并将其与其他更日常的体验联系起来。他们个人并不怀疑上帝的存在，而且许多人他们深知自身成就的局限性。这些论证并非旨在说服不信者，因为当时还没有我们现代意义上的无神论者。因此，这种自然神学并非宗教体验的前奏，而是其伴随物：费拉苏夫夫妇并不认为，你必须先理性地确信上帝的存在，才能获得神秘体验。恰恰相反，在犹太教、伊斯兰教和希腊东正教的世界里，哲学家们的上帝正迅速被神秘主义者的上帝所取代。

Both Bonaventure and Aquinas had seen the religious experience as primary. They had been faithful to the tradition of Falsafah, since in both Judaism and Islam, philosophers had often been mystics who were acutely conscious of the limitations of the intellect in theological matters. They had evolved rational proofs of God’s existence to articulate their religious faith with their scientific studies and to link it with other more ordinary experiences. They did not personally doubt God’s existence, and many were well aware of the limitations of their achievement. These proofs were not designed to convince unbelievers, since there were as yet no atheists in our modern sense. This natural theology was, therefore, not a prelude to religious experience but an accompaniment: the Faylasufs did not believe that you had to convince yourself of God’s existence rationally before you could have a mystical experience. If anything, it was the other way around. In the Jewish, Muslim and Greek Orthodox worlds, the God of the philosophers was being rapidly overtaken by the God of the mystics.

7

神秘主义者的神

7

The God of the Mystics

J乌达教、基督教以及——在较小程度上——伊斯兰教都发展出了人格化的上帝观念，因此我们倾向于认为这种理想代表了宗教的最高境界。人格化的上帝帮助一神论者珍视个人神圣且不可剥夺的权利，并培养了对人性的欣赏。犹太教-基督教传统由此帮助西方获得了其高度重视的自由人文主义。这些价值观最初被赋予了一位人格化的上帝，他像人类一样做着一切：他爱、审判、惩罚、观看、聆听、创造和毁灭，如同我们一样。耶和华最初是一位高度人格化的神，拥有人类热情洋溢的喜好和厌恶。后来，他成为超越性的象征，他的思想非同于我们的思想，他的道路高过我们，如同天高地低。人格化的上帝反映了一个重要的宗教洞见：任何至高无上的价值都不能低于人性。因此，人格化一直是宗教和道德发展中一个重要且——对许多人而言——不可或缺的阶段。以色列的先知们将自身的情感和激情归于上帝；佛教徒和印度教徒则必须对至高无上的化身表达个人的虔诚。基督教以人为中心构建宗教生活，这在宗教史上是独一无二的：它将犹太教固有的个人主义推向了极致。或许，如果没有某种程度的认同和共情，宗教就无法扎根。

JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY and—to a lesser extent—Islam have all developed the idea of a personal God, so we tend to think that this ideal represents religion at its best. The personal God has helped monotheists to value the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual and to cultivate an appreciation of human personality. The Judeo-Christian tradition has thus helped the West to acquire the liberal humanism it values so highly. These values were originally enshrined in a personal God who does everything that a human being does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears, creates and destroys as we do. Yahweh began as a highly personalized deity with passionate human likes and dislikes. Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human. Thus personalism has been an important and—for many—an indispensable stage of religious and moral development. The prophets of Israel attributed their own emotions and passions to God; Buddhists and Hindus had to include a personal devotion to avatars of the supreme reality. Christianity made a human person the center of the religious life in a way that was unique in the history of religion: it took the personalism inherent in Judaism to an extreme. It may be that without some degree of this kind of identification and empathy, religion cannot take root.

然而，人格化的神也可能成为一种严重的隐患。他可能只是按照我们自己的形象雕刻的偶像，是我们有限的需求、恐惧和欲望的投射。我们可能会想当然地认为他爱我们所爱的，恨我们所恨的。仇恨，是对我们偏见的认可，而不是促使我们超越它们。当他似乎无法阻止灾难，甚至似乎渴望悲剧发生时，他显得冷酷无情。轻易地相信灾难是上帝的旨意，会让我们接受一些根本上不可接受的事情。上帝作为一个人，拥有性别这一事实本身也是一种局限：这意味着一半人类的性欲被神圣化，而女性的性欲却被忽视，这可能导致人类性道德中一种神经质且不平衡的失衡。因此，人格化的上帝可能是危险的。他不会引领我们超越自身的局限，反而会鼓励我们安于现状；他会使我们变得像他自己一样残酷、冷漠、自满和偏袒。他不会激发所有高级宗教都应具备的慈悲之心，反而会鼓励我们评判、谴责和边缘化他人。因此，人格化的上帝的概念似乎只能是我们宗教发展的一个阶段。世界各大宗教似乎都认识到了这种危险，并寻求超越个人对至高现实的理解。

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.

犹太教经典可以被解读为对部落式、人格化的耶和华（Yahweh）的提炼，以及最终将其舍弃的故事，耶和华最终演变为YHWH。基督教，可以说是三大一神教中最具人格化的宗教，试图通过引入超个人三位一体的教义来限定对道成肉身的神的崇拜。穆斯林很快就对《古兰经》中那些暗示上帝像人类一样“看”、“听”和“审判”的经文感到不满。这三大一神教都发展出了神秘主义传统，使他们的上帝超越了人格化的范畴，更接近于涅槃和梵我合一的非人格化现实。只有少数人能够真正体验神秘主义，但在所有三大宗教中（西方基督教除外），直到近代，神秘主义者所体验到的上帝最终都成为了信徒的普遍认知。

It is possible to read the Jewish scriptures as the story of the refinement and, later, of the abandoment of the tribal and personalized Yahweh who became YHWH. Christianity, arguably the most personalized religion of the three monotheistic faiths, tried to qualify the cult of God incarnate by introducing the doctrine of the transpersonal Trinity. Muslims very soon had problems with those passages in the Koran which implied that God “sees,” “hears” and “judges” like human beings. All three of the monotheistic religions developed a mystical tradition, which made their God transcend the personal category and become more similar to the impersonal realities of nirvana and Brahman-Atman. Only a few people are capable of true mysticism, but in all three faiths (with the exception of Western Christianity) it was the God experienced by the mystics which eventually became normative among the faithful, until relatively recently.

历史上的一神论并非最初就带有神秘主义色彩。我们已经注意到，像佛陀这样的冥想者与先知们的体验有所不同。犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教本质上都是积极的信仰，致力于确保上帝的旨意在地上如同在天上一样得到执行。这些先知宗教的核心主题是上帝与人类的对抗或个人相遇。人们体验到上帝是一种行动的命令；他召唤我们归向他；让我们选择接受或拒绝他的爱与关怀。这位上帝通过对话而非静默冥想与人类建立联系。他发出圣言，这圣言成为虔诚信仰的核心，并且必须被奉行。痛苦地化身于尘世生活的缺陷与悲剧之中。在基督教——这三大宗教中最具个人色彩的——中，与上帝的关系以爱为特征。但爱的意义在于，某种意义上，自我必须被消灭。无论是在对话还是爱中，自我中心主义都始终存在。语言本身也可能是一种局限，因为它将我们束缚于世俗经验的概念之中。

Historical monotheism was not originally mystical. We have noted the difference between the experience of a contemplative such as the Buddha and the prophets. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all essentially active faiths, devoted to ensuring that God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. The central motif of these prophetic religions is confrontation or a personal meeting between God and humanity. This God is experienced as an imperative to action; he calls us to himself; gives us the choice of rejecting or accepting his love and concern. This God relates to human beings by means of a dialogue rather than silent contemplation. He utters a Word, which becomes the chief focus of devotion and which has to be painfully incarnated in the flawed and tragic conditions of earthly life. In Christianity, the most personalized of the three, the relationship with God is characterized by love. But the point of love is that the ego has, in some sense, to be annihilated. In either dialogue or love, egotism is a perpetual possibility. Language itself can be a limiting faculty since it embeds us in the concepts of our mundane experience.

先知们曾向神话宣战：他们的神活跃于历史和当下的政治事件中，而非神话所描绘的原始神圣时代。然而，当一神论者转向神秘主义时，神话又重新确立了其作为宗教体验主要载体的地位。“神话”、“神秘主义”和“谜团”这三个词之间存在着语言学上的联系。它们都源自希腊语动词musteion，意为闭上眼睛或嘴巴。因此，这三个词都根植于对黑暗和寂静的体验。¹如今在西方^，这些词并不常用。例如，“神话”一词常常被用作谎言的同义词：在通俗语境中，神话指的是不真实的事物。政客或电影明星会用“神话”来驳斥对其行为的诽谤报道，学者们也会将对过去的错误观点称为“神话般的”。自启蒙运动以来，“谜团”一直被视为需要解开的谜团。它常常与思维混乱联系在一起。在美国，侦探小说被称为“神秘小说”（mystery），而这类小说的精髓就在于问题能够得到圆满解决。我们将看到，在启蒙运动时期，就连宗教人士也开始将“神秘”（mystery）视为贬义词。同样，“神秘主义”（mysterism）也常常与怪人、江湖骗子或放纵的嬉皮士联系在一起。由于西方从未对神秘主义抱有太大热情，即便在其于世界其他地区盛行的时期也是如此，因此人们对这种精神追求所必需的智慧和自律知之甚少。

The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial, sacred time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience. There is a linguistic connection between the three words “myth,” “mysticism” and “mystery.” All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.¹ They are not popular words in the West today. The word “myth,” for example, is often used as a synonym for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. A politician or a film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their activities by saying that they are “myths” and scholars will refer to mistaken views of the past as “mythical.” Since the Enlightenment, a “mystery” has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up. It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. In the United States, a detective story is called a “mystery” and it is of the essence of this genre that the problem be solved satisfactorily. We shall see that even religious people came to regard “mystery” as a bad word during the Enlightenment. Similarly “mysticism” is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence and discipline that are essential to this type of spirituality.

然而，种种迹象表明，风向可能正在转变。自20世纪60年代以来，西方人逐渐发现了某些瑜伽类型的益处，而像佛教这样未受不完善的有神论污染的宗教，在欧美蓬勃发展。已故美国学者约瑟夫·坎贝尔关于神话学的著作近来也颇受关注。西方目前对精神分析的热情可以被视为对某种神秘主义的渴望，因为我们会发现这两个学科之间存在着惊人的相似之处。神话学常常被用来解释心灵的内在世界，而弗洛伊德和荣格都曾本能地转向神话学。他们援引古代神话，例如希腊神话中的俄狄浦斯故事，来解释他们的新兴科学。或许西方人感到需要一种替代纯粹科学世界观的解释。

Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning. Since the 1960s Western people have been discovering the benefits of certain types of Yoga, and religions such as Buddhism, which have the advantage of being uncontaminated by an inadequate theism, have enjoyed a great flowering in Europe and the United States. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell on mythology has enjoyed a recent vogue. The current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism, for we shall find arresting similarities between the two disciplines. Mythology has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche, and both Freud and Jung turned instinctively to ancient myths, such as the Greek story of Oedipus, to explain their new science. It may be that people in the West are feeling the need for an alternative to a purely scientific view of the world.

神秘宗教比以理性思考为主的信仰更直接，也更能在困境中提供帮助。神秘主义的修行帮助信徒回归“一”，回归最初的本源，并培养一种持续的临在感。然而，在二、三世纪发展起来的早期犹太神秘主义，对犹太人而言却异常艰难，它似乎强调了神与人之间的鸿沟。犹太人渴望逃离一个他们遭受迫害和边缘化的世界，进入一个更加强大的神圣领域。他们将上帝想象成一位威严的君王，只有通过穿越七重天的艰险旅程才能接近他。与拉比们简洁明了的表达方式不同，神秘主义者们使用华丽而雄辩的语言。拉比们厌恶这种灵性，而神秘主义者们则竭力避免与他们产生冲突。然而，这种被称为“宝座神秘主义”的思想必然满足了某种重要的需求，因为它与伟大的拉比学院并存发展，最终在十二至十三世纪被纳入卡巴拉——犹太教的新神秘主义。五至六世纪在巴比伦编纂的宝座神秘主义经典文本表明，这些神秘主义者虽然不愿公开自己的经历，却与拉比传统有着强烈的共鸣，因为他们将阿基瓦拉比、以实玛利拉比和约哈南拉比等伟大的拉比奉为这一灵性领域的英雄。他们为犹太民族开辟了一条通往神的新道路，展现了犹太精神的全新境界。

Mystical religion is more immediate and tends to be more help in time of trouble than a predominantly cerebral faith. The disciplines of mysticism help the adept to return to the One, the primordial beginning, and to cultivate a constant sense of presence. Yet the early Jewish mysticism that developed during the second and third centuries, which was very difficult for Jews, seemed to emphasize the gulf between God and man. Jews wanted to turn away from a world in which they were persecuted and marginalized to a more powerful divine realm. They imagined God as a mighty king who could only be approached in a perilous journey through the seven heavens. Instead of expressing themselves in the simple direct style of the Rabbis, the mystics used sonorous, grandiloquent language. The Rabbis hated this spirituality, and the mystics were anxious not to antagonize them. Yet this “Throne Mysticism,” as it was called, must have fulfilled an important need since it continued to flourish alongside the great rabbinic academies until it was finally incorporated into Kabbalah, the new Jewish mysticism, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The classic texts of Throne Mysticism, which were edited in Babylon in the fifth and sixth centuries, suggest that the mystics, who were reticent about their experiences, felt a strong affinity with rabbinic tradition, since they make such great tannaim as Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Yohannan the heroes of this spirituality. They revealed a new extremity in the Jewish spirit, as they blazed a new trail to God on behalf of their people.

正如我们所见，拉比们曾有过一些非凡的宗教体验。在圣灵以天火的形式降临在约哈南拉比及其门徒身上时，他们显然正在讨论以西结所见的上帝战车异象的含义。这辆战车以及以西结瞥见的坐在宝座上的神秘人物，似乎是早期神秘学推测的主题。《战车研究》（Ma'aseh Merkavah ）常常与对创世故事（ Ma'aseh Bereshit ）含义的推测联系在一起。我们所知的最早关于神秘地升入至高天上帝宝座的记载，强调了这段精神之旅的巨大危险：

The Rabbis had had some remarkable religious experiences, as we have seen. On the occasion when the Holy Spirit descended upon Rabbi Yohannan and his disciples in the form of fire from heaven, they had apparently been discussing the meaning of Ezekiel’s strange vision of God’s chariot. The chariot and the mysterious figure that Ezekiel had glimpsed sitting upon its throne seem to have been the subject of early esoteric speculation. The Study of the Chariot (Ma’aseh Merkavah) was often linked to speculation about the meaning of the creation story (Ma’aseh Bereshit). The earliest account we have of the mystical ascent to God’s throne in the highest heavens emphasized the immense perils of this spiritual journey:

只有阿基瓦拉比足够成熟，才能毫发无损地走完神秘之路。深入心灵的旅程蕴含着巨大的个人风险，因为我们可能无法承受在那里所发现的一切。正因如此，所有宗教都坚持认为，神秘之旅必须在专家的指导下进行，专家可以监控整个过程，引导初学者避开危险之处，并确保他们不会像可怜的本·阿扎伊那样过度透支自己的能力，最终导致死亡，或者像本·佐玛那样精神失常。所有神秘主义者都强调智慧和心理稳定性的必要性。禅宗大师认为，神经质的人试图通过冥想来治愈疾病是徒劳的，因为那只会加重他们的病情。一些被尊为神秘主义者的欧洲天主教圣人的怪异行为必须被视为异常现象。这段关于塔木德圣贤的神秘故事表明，犹太人从一开始就意识到其中的危险：后来，他们不允许年轻人在完全成熟之前接受卡巴拉的入门仪式。此外，神秘主义者还必须结婚，以确保其性健康。

Only Rabbi Akiva was mature enough to survive the mystical way unscathed. A journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risks because we may not be able to endure what we find there. That is why all religions have insisted that the mystical journey can only be undertaken under the guidance of an expert, who can monitor the experience, guide the novice past the perilous places and make sure that he is not exceeding his strength, like poor Ben Azzai, who died, and Ben Zoma, who went mad. All mystics stress the need for intelligence and mental stability. Zen masters say that it is useless for a neurotic person to seek a cure in meditation, for that will only make him sicker. The strange and outlandish behavior of some European Catholic saints who were revered as mystics must be regarded as aberrations. This cryptic story of the Talmudic sages shows that Jews had been aware of the dangers from the very beginning: later, they would not let young people become initiated into the disciplines of Kabbalah until they were fully mature. A mystic also had to be married, to ensure that he was in good sexual health.

神秘主义者必须穿越神话中的七重天，才能抵达上帝的宝座。但这仅仅是一次想象的飞行。它从未被字面理解，而始终被视为一次象征性的心灵之旅，穿越神秘的心灵领域。阿基瓦拉比关于“纯净大理石”的奇特警告，或许指的是神秘主义者在想象旅程中各个关键节点必须念诵的密码。这些意象的视觉化是复杂修行的一部分。如今我们知道，潜意识是一个充满意象的庞大集合体，它会在梦境、幻觉以及诸如癫痫或精神分裂症等异常的精神或神经疾病中浮现。犹太神秘主义者并非想象自己“真的”在天空中飞行或进入上帝的宫殿，而是以一种可控且有序的方式，驾驭充斥在他们脑海中的宗教意象。这需要高超的技巧、特定的心境和训练。它需要与禅宗或瑜伽修行相同的专注力，这些修行方式也能帮助修行者找到前进的方向。心灵的迷宫之路。巴比伦圣贤海·高恩（939-1038）以当时的神秘实践诠释了四圣贤的故事。“果园”象征着灵魂神秘地升华至上帝宫殿的“天庭”（hekhalot）。若有人渴望进行这段想象中的内在旅程，他必须“品德高尚”且“拥有某些特质”，才能“瞻仰天庭的战车和高处的众天使殿堂”。这不会自发发生。他必须进行一些类似于世界各地瑜伽士和冥想者所修习的练习：

The mystic had to journey to the Throne of God through the mythological realm of the seven heavens. Yet this was only an imaginary flight. It was never taken literally but was always seen as a symbolic ascent through the mysterious regions of the mind. Rabbi Akiva’s strange warning about the “stones of pure marble” may refer to the password that the mystic had to utter at various crucial points in his imaginary journey. These images were visualized as part of an elaborate discipline. Today we know that the unconscious is a teeming mass of imagery that surfaces in dreams, in hallucinations and in aberrant psychic or neurological conditions such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. Jewish mystics did not imagine that they were “really” flying through the sky or entering God’s palace but were marshaling the religious images that filled their minds in a controlled and ordered way. This demanded great skill and a certain disposition and training. It required the same kind of concentration as the disciplines of Zen or Yoga, which also help the adept to find his way through the labyrinthine paths of the psyche. The Babylonian sage Hai Gaon (939–1038) explained the story of the four sages by means of contemporary mystical practice. The “orchard” refers to the mystical ascent of the soul to the “Heavenly Halls” (hekhalot) of God’s palace. A man who wishes to make this imaginary, interior journey must be “worthy” and “blessed with certain qualities” if he wishes “to gaze at the heavenly chariot and the halls of the angels on high.” It will not happen spontaneously. He has to perform certain exercises that are similar to those practiced by Yogis and contemplatives all the world over:

虽然这种宝座神秘主义的最早文献只能追溯到二三世纪，但这种冥想方式可能更为古老。例如，圣保罗曾提到一位“属于弥赛亚”的朋友，他大约在十四年前被提到第三层天。保罗不确定如何解读这个异象，但他相信这个人“被提到乐园里，听到了一些不能用人语言表达、也不能用人语言表达的事情” ^。⁴

Although the earliest texts of this Throne Mysticism date only to the second or third centuries, this kind of contemplation was probably older. Thus St. Paul refers to a friend “who belonged to the Messiah” who had been caught up to the third heaven some fourteen years earlier. Paul was not sure how to interpret this vision but believed that the man “was caught up into paradise and heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language.”⁴

这些幻象本身并非目的，而是通往一种超越寻常概念、难以言喻的宗教体验的途径。它们会受到神秘主义者特定宗教传统的制约。犹太教的先知会看到七重天的景象，因为他的宗教想象力中充满了这些特定的象征符号。佛教徒会看到各种佛像和菩萨的形象；基督徒会看到圣母玛利亚的形象。先知若将这些精神幻象视为客观存在，或将其视为超越超越的象征，那就大错特错了。由于幻觉往往是一种病态状态，因此，在专注的冥想和内省过程中，需要相当的技巧和心理平衡才能处理和解读这些涌现的象征符号。

The visions are not ends in themselves but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas; Christians visualize the Virgin Mary. It is a mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than symbols of transcendence. Since hallucination is often a pathological state, considerable skill and mental balance is required to handle and interpret the symbols that emerge during the course of concentrated meditation and inner reflection.

在这些早期犹太异象中，最奇特也最具争议的莫过于《希乌尔·科玛》（Shiur Qomah，意为“测量高度”），这是一部五世纪的文献，描述了以西结在上帝宝座上看到的形象。《希乌尔·科玛》称此人为“约兹雷努”（Yotzrenu），意为“我们的创造者”。对上帝异象的这种奇特描述很可能源自《雅歌》中的一段经文，而《雅歌》正是拉比阿基瓦最喜爱的圣经文本。新娘这样描述她的爱人：

One of the strangest and most controversial of these early Jewish visions is found in the Shiur Qomah (The Measurement of the Height), a fifth-century text which describes the figure that Ezekiel had seen on God’s throne. The Shiur Qomah calls this being Yotzrenu, “Our Creator.” Its peculiar description of this vision of God is probably based on a passage from the Song of Songs, which was Rabbi Akiva’s favorite biblical text. The Bride describes her Lover:

有些人认为这是对上帝的描述：令几代犹太人感到震惊的是，《库玛经》竟然逐一测量了经文中列出的上帝的每一个肢体。在这部奇异的经文中，对上帝的测量令人费解，难以理解。“帕拉桑”（parasang）——基本单位——相当于180万亿根“手指”，而每根“手指”都横跨地球一端到另一端。如此庞大的尺寸令人瞠目结舌，人们甚至放弃尝试去理解或想象如此巨大的形象。这正是关键所在。《库玛经》试图告诉我们，我们不可能用人类的尺度来衡量上帝或定义他。仅仅是尝试这样做就证明了这种尝试的徒劳，并让我们对上帝的超越性有了全新的体验。毫不奇怪，许多犹太人认为这种试图测量完全精神化的上帝的怪异做法是对上帝的亵渎。正因如此，像《库玛经》这样的深奥经文才被刻意隐藏起来，不让不明真相的人接触到。从上下文来看，《希乌尔·科玛》能让那些在灵性导师的指导下，以正确方式研习的信徒，对神的超越性获得新的领悟。它超越了所有人类的范畴。它当然不能按字面意思理解；它当然也不包含任何秘密信息。它刻意营造了一种令人惊叹和敬畏的氛围。

Some saw this as a description of God: to the consternation of generations of Jews, the Shiur Qomah proceeded to measure each one of God’s limbs listed here. In this strange text, the measurements of God are baffling. The mind cannot cope. The “parasang”—the basic unit—is equivalent to 180 trillion “fingers” and each “finger” stretches from one end of the earth to the other. These massive dimensions boggle the mind, which gives up trying to follow them or even to conceive a figure of such size. That is the point. The Shiur is trying to tell us that it is impossible to measure God or contain him in human terms. The mere attempt to do so demonstrates the impossibility of the project and gives us a new experience of God’s transcendence. Not surprisingly, many Jews have found this odd attempt to measure the wholly spiritual God blasphemous. That is why an esoteric text such as the Shiur was kept hidden from the unwary. Seen in context, the Shiur Qomah would give to those adepts who were prepared to approach it in the right way, under the guidance of their spiritual director, a new insight into the transcendence of a God which exceeds all human categories. It is certainly not meant to be taken literally; it certainly conveys no secret information. It is a deliberate evocation of a mood that created a sense of wonder and awe.

《希乌尔》向我们介绍了神秘主义对上帝的描绘中两个至关重要的要素，这两个要素在所有三种宗教中都普遍存在。首先，它本质上是想象的；其次，它是不可言说的。《希乌尔》中描述的形象是神秘主义者在灵性升华的终点所见到的端坐于宝座之上的上帝。这位上帝身上丝毫没有温柔、慈爱或亲切的成分；事实上，他的神圣似乎令人感到疏离。然而，当他们见到他时，这些神秘的英雄们便会吟唱起歌谣，这些歌谣虽然几乎没有提供关于上帝的任何信息，却给人留下了极其深刻的印象：

The Shiur introduces us to two essential ingredients in the mystical portrait of God, which are common in all three faiths. First, it is essentially imaginative; secondly, it is ineffable. The figure described in the Shiur is the image of God whom the mystics see sitting enthroned at the end of their ascent. There is absolutely nothing tender, loving or personal about this God; indeed his holiness seems alienating. When they see him, however, the mystical heroes burst into songs which give very little information about God but which leave an immense impression:

如果我们无法想象耶和华的外衣是什么样子，我们又怎能想象看到上帝本身呢？

If we cannot imagine what Yahweh’s cloak is like, how can we think to behold God himself?

早期犹太神秘主义文本中最著名的或许要数五世纪的《创世之书》（ Sefer Yezirah）。这部著作并未试图以写实的手法描述创造过程；它毫不掩饰地运用象征手法，展现了上帝如何通过语言创造世界，如同书写一本书一般。然而，语言已被彻底改造，创造的信息也变得不再清晰。希伯来字母表中的每个字母都被赋予了一个数值；通过将字母与神圣的数字组合，并以无穷无尽的方式重新排列，神秘主义者逐渐摆脱了词语的常规含义。其目的在于绕过理性，提醒犹太人，没有任何词语或概念能够代表上帝之名所指向的现实。再次强调，将语言推向极限并使其产生非语言意义的体验，创造了一种对上帝“他者性”的感知。神秘主义者并不渴望与上帝进行直接的对话，他们体验到的上帝是一种压倒性的神圣，而非一位充满同情心的朋友和父亲。

Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth-century Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed, and the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words. The purpose was to bypass the intellect and remind Jews that no words or concepts could represent the reality to which the Name pointed. Again, the experience of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a non-linguistic significance created a sense of the otherness of God. Mystics did not want a straightforward dialogue with a God whom they experienced as an overwhelming holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father.

王座神秘主义并非独一无二。据说先知穆罕默德也曾信奉王座神秘主义。穆罕默德在夜行登霄之旅中，从阿拉伯半岛前往耶路撒冷圣殿山时，也经历过类似的体验。他当时在睡梦中被加百列用天马运送。抵达后，亚伯拉罕、摩西、耶稣和其他众多先知迎接了他，并确认了穆罕默德的先知使命。随后，加百列和穆罕默德开始了他们险峻的登天之旅（米拉吉），穿越七重天，每一重天都由一位先知掌管。最终，穆罕默德到达了神圣的领域。早期文献出于敬畏，对最后的景象保持沉默，而人们认为《古兰经》中的这些经文指的就是这一景象。

Throne Mysticism was not unique. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have had a very similar experience when he made his Night Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse. On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and a crowd of other prophets, who confirmed Muhammad in his own prophetic mission. Then Gabriel and Muhammad began their perilous ascent up a ladder (miraj through the seven heavens, each of which was presided over by a prophet. Finally Muhammad reached the divine sphere. The early sources reverently keep silent about the final vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed to refer.

穆罕默德并未亲眼见到上帝，他所见的只是指向神圣现实的象征：在印度教中，莲花树象征着理性思维的极限。对上帝的显现无法诉诸于我们通常的思维或语言经验。升入天堂象征着人类精神的至高境界，标志着终极意义的门槛。

Muhammad did not see God himself but only symbols that pointed to the divine reality: in Hinduism the lote-tree marks the limit of rational thought. There is no way in which the vision of God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language. The ascent to heaven is a symbol of the furthest reach of the human spirit, which marks the threshold of ultimate meaning.

上升的意象很常见。圣奥古斯丁曾与母亲在奥斯蒂亚经历了一次升天之旅，他用普罗提诺的语言描述了这段经历：

The imagery of ascent is common. St. Augustine had experienced an ascent to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language of Plotinus:

奥古斯丁的脑海中充满了希腊人关于存在之链的意象，而非闪米特人关于七重天的意象。这并非一次穿越外太空、抵达“彼岸”之神的字面意义上的旅程，而是一次通往内在现实的精神升华。当他说道“我们的心灵被提升”时，这种欣喜若狂的飞跃似乎是来自外部的恩赐，仿佛他和莫妮卡只是被动地接受恩典。然而，在这稳步攀升至“永恒存在”的过程中，却蕴含着深思熟虑。类似的升华意象也曾出现过。正如约瑟夫·坎贝尔所说，从西伯利亚到火地岛，萨满的恍惚体验中都曾出现过这种现象^。9

Augustine’s mind was filled with the Greek imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens. This was not a literal journey through outer space to a God “out there” but a mental ascent to a reality within. This rapturous flight seems something given, from without, when he says “our minds were lifted up” as though he and Monica were passive recipients of grace, but there is a deliberation in this steady climb toward “eternal being.” Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance experiences of Shamans “from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego,” as Joseph Campbell puts it.⁹

上升的象征表明世俗的感知已被远远抛在身后。最终达到的与神相遇的体验是完全无法描述的，因为常规的语言已不再适用。犹太神秘主义者描述的一切都与神无关！他们讲述神的斗篷、宫殿、天庭以及遮蔽他免受世人目光的面纱，这象征着永恒的原型。推测穆罕默德升天的穆斯林强调他最终见到神的景象的悖论性：他既看到了神圣的存在，又没有看到。10^当神秘主义者在脑海中探索完意象的领域后，他便到达了一个概念和想象力都无法再带他继续前进的境界。奥古斯丁和莫妮卡同样对他们升天的高潮讳莫如深，强调其超越了空间、时间和日常知识。他们“呼唤、喘息”着神，并在“全神贯注的瞬间，在某种程度上触及了神”。¹¹然后他们不得不恢复正常的语言表达方式，句子有开头、中间和结尾：

The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been left far behind. The experience of God that is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak, his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims who speculated about Muhammad’s flight to heaven stress the paradoxical nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did not see the divine presence.¹⁰ Once the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their flight, stressing its transcendence of space, time and ordinary knowledge. They “talked and panted” for God, and “touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of heart.”¹¹ Then they had to return to normal speech, where a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end:

这并非对一位人格化的上帝的自然主义式理解：他们并没有通过任何通常的自然主义交流方式——例如日常言语、天使之声、自然界或梦境的象征意义——“听到他的声音”。他们似乎“触及”了超越这一切的实在^。13

This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so to speak, “heard his voice” through any of the normal methods of naturalistic communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they had “touched” the Reality which lay beyond all these things.¹³

尽管这种“向上攀升”显然受到文化制约，但它似乎是生活中一个不容置疑的事实。无论我们如何解读，世界各地、各个历史阶段的人们都经历过这种现象。冥想体验。一神论者称这种高潮式的顿悟为“神的显现”；普罗提诺认为它是体验“一”；佛教徒则称之为涅槃的预兆。关键在于，这是拥有某种精神天赋的人类一直渴望体验的。所有信仰都具有一些共同的特征，即对神的神秘体验。这是一种主观体验，涉及一段内在的旅程，而非对自身之外的客观事实的感知；它是通过心灵中负责图像构建的部分——通常被称为想象力——而非通过更偏重理性、逻辑的思维能力来实现的。最后，它是神秘主义者有意识地在自身中创造的：某些特定的身心练习会带来最终的顿悟；它并非总是不期而至。

Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of “ascent” seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a “vision of God”; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind—often called the imagination—rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares.

奥古斯丁似乎认为，有特权的人有时能够在今生见到上帝：他以摩西和圣保罗为例。教皇格里高利一世（540-604 年）是一位公认的灵修大师，同时也是一位权势显赫的教皇，他对此持不同意见。他并非知识分子，而且作为典型的罗马人，他对灵性持有更为务实的看法。他运用云、雾或黑暗等比喻，暗示人类对神圣的认知是晦涩难懂的。在他看来，上帝隐藏在人类无法穿透的黑暗之中，这种黑暗远比尼撒的格里高利和狄尼思等希腊基督徒所经历的无知之云更加痛苦。对格里高利而言，上帝是一种令人痛苦的体验。他坚持认为，上帝难以接近。我们当然不可能像与上帝有共同语言那样亲切地谈论他。我们对上帝一无所知。我们无法根据对人的了解来预测他的行为：“只有当我们意识到我们无法完全了解上帝时，我们所了解的关于上帝的知识才具有真理。” ¹⁴格列高利经常强调接近上帝的痛苦和艰辛。默想的喜乐与平安只能在经历一番艰苦的挣扎后才能短暂获得。在品尝上帝的甘甜之前，灵魂必须挣脱其与生俱来的黑暗：

Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St. Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behavior on the basis of our knowledge of people: “Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him.”¹⁴ Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle. Before tasting God’s sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element: It

唯有经过“极大的心灵努力”，才能接近上帝，如同雅各与天使搏斗一般。通往上帝的道路充满罪恶感、泪水和疲惫；当灵魂接近上帝时，“除了哭泣，别无他法”。因渴望上帝而“饱受折磨”，灵魂“在泪水中寻求安息，最终筋疲力竭”。 ¹⁶格列高利在十二世纪之前一直是重要的精神导师；显然，西方世界仍然觉得与上帝相处是一种挑战。

God could only be reached after “a great effort of the mind,” which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, “the soul could do nothing but weep.” “Tortured” by its desire for God, it only “found rest in tears, being wearied out.”¹⁶ Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain.

在东方，基督教对上帝的体验以光明而非黑暗为特征。希腊人发展出一种不同的神秘主义形式，这种形式也遍布世界各地。它不依赖于图像和幻象，而是基于阿雷奥帕吉特的德尼所描述的否定神学或静默体验。他们自然而然地摒弃了所有理性主义的上帝观。正如尼撒的格列高利在其《雅歌注释》中所解释的那样，“凡是头脑所把握的概念，都会成为寻求真理者的障碍。” 冥想者的目标是超越观念，超越一切图像，因为这些只会分散注意力。如此，他便能获得一种“某种临在感”，这种感觉难以言喻，并且无疑超越了所有与他人关系的人类体验。¹⁷这种状态被称为“hesychia ”，意为“宁静”或“内在的静默”。既然言语、观念和图像只能将我们束缚于世俗世界，束缚于此时此地，那么心灵就必须通过专注的技巧来刻意地平静下来，从而培养一种静默的等待状态。唯有如此，我们才能有望领悟到超越一切想象的实在。

In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterized by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found worldwide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, “every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.” The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire “a certain sense of presence” that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person.¹⁷ This attitude was called hesychia, “tranquillity” or “interior silence.” Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive.

如何才能认识一位不可理解的神呢？希腊人喜爱这种悖论，而静修主义者则回归到古老的区分，即神的本质（ousia）与他在世间的“能量”（energeiai）或活动，正是这些活动使我们能够体验到一些神性。既然我们永远无法认识神本身，那么我们在祈祷中体验到的便是他的“能量”，而非他的“本质”。这些能量可以被描述为神圣的“光芒”，它们照亮世界，是神性的倾泻，但与神本身却截然不同，正如阳光与太阳截然不同。它们展现了一位完全沉默且不可知的神。正如圣巴西勒所说：“我们正是通过他的能量来认识我们的神；我们并不声称我们接近了本质本身，因为他的能量降临到我们身上，但他的本质却始终遥不可及。” ¹⁸在旧约中，这种神圣的“能量”被称为上帝的“荣耀”（kavod）。在新约中，它曾在塔博尔山上基督身上彰显，当时他的人性被神圣的光芒所转化。如今，这光芒渗透到整个受造宇宙，并使万物神化。那些蒙恩得救的人。正如“energeiai”一词所暗示的那样，这是一种积极主动、充满活力的上帝观。西方人认为上帝通过其永恒的属性——良善、公正、慈爱和全能——来彰显自身，而希腊人则认为上帝以一种永不停息的活动来展现自身，祂以某种方式临在于其中。

How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox, and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between God’s essence (ousia) and his “energies” (energeiai) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the “energies” not the “essence,” that we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the “rays” of divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable. As St. Basil had said: “It is by his energies that we know our God; we do not assert that we come near to the essence itself, for his energies descend to us but his essence remains unapproachable.”¹⁸ In the Old Testament, this divine “energy” had been called God’s “glory” (kavod). In the New Testament, it had shone forth in the person of Christ on Mount Tabor, when his humanity had been transfigured by the divine rays. Now they penetrated the whole created universe and deified those who had been saved. As the word energeiai implied, this was an active and dynamic conception of God. Where the West would see God making himself known by means of his eternal attributes—his goodness, justice, love and omnipotence—the Greeks saw God making himself accessible in a ceaseless activity in which he was somehow present.

因此，当我们在祈祷中体验到“能量”时，某种意义上我们是在与神直接交流，即便那不可知的实在本身仍然晦涩难懂。静修主义的领军人物埃瓦格里乌斯·蓬图斯（卒于公元399年）坚持认为，我们在祈祷中获得的关于神的“知识”与概念或形象毫无关系，而是一种超越这些概念或形象的直接的神圣体验。因此，对于静修者来说，重要的是要赤裸裸地释放自己的灵魂：“当你们祈祷时，”他告诉他的修士们，“不要在心中塑造任何神祇的形象，也不要让任何形式的印记塑造你们的心灵。”相反，他们应该“以非物质的方式接近非物质”。 ¹⁹埃瓦格里乌斯提出的是一种基督教瑜伽。这并非一个反思的过程；事实上，“祈祷意味着舍弃思想”。 ²⁰它更像是对神的直觉领悟。这将带来一种万物一体的感受，一种摆脱干扰和纷扰的自由，以及自我意识的消融——这种体验显然类似于佛教等无神论宗教中冥想者的体验。通过系统地将心智从诸如骄傲、贪婪、悲伤或愤怒等将他们与自我束缚的“激情”中剥离出来，灵修者将超越自我，如同耶稣在塔博尔山上被神圣的“能量”转化一般，达到神化的境界。

When we experienced the “energies” in prayer, therefore, we were in some sense communing with God directly, even though the unknowable reality itself remained in obscurity. The leading hesychast Evagrius Pontus (d. 399) insisted that the “knowledge” that we had of God in prayer had nothing whatever to do with concepts or images but was an immediate experience of the divine which transcended these. It was important, therefore, for hesychasts to strip their souls naked: “When you are praying,” he told his monks, “do not shape within yourself any image of the deity and do not let your mind be shaped by the impress of any form.” Instead, they should “approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner.”¹⁹ Evagrius was proposing a sort of Christian Yoga. This was not a process of reflection; indeed, “prayer means the shedding of thought.”²⁰ It was rather an intuitive apprehension of God. It will result in a sense of the unity of all things, a freedom from distraction and multiplicity, and the loss of ego—an experience that is clearly akin to that produced by contemplatives in nontheistic religions like Buddhism. By systematically weaning their minds away from their “passions”—such as pride, greed, sadness or anger which tied them to the ego—hesychasts would transcend themselves and become deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor, transfigured by the divine “energies.”

五世纪福提斯的主教狄奥多库斯坚持认为，这种神化并非要等到来世才能实现，而是可以在今生有意识地体验到。他教导了一种与呼吸相关的专注方法：静修者吸气时默念“耶稣基督，上帝之子”；呼气时默念“怜悯我们”。后来的静修者进一步完善了这种练习：冥想者应低头低肩，目光看向自己的心脏或肚脐。他们应逐渐放慢呼吸，将注意力转向内在，集中于某些心理焦点，例如心脏。这是一种必须谨慎使用的严格修行；只有在经验丰富的指导下才能安全练习。渐渐地，如同佛教僧侣一般，静修者会发现自己可以轻轻地将理性思维搁置一旁，充斥于脑海中的种种意象会逐渐消散，静修者会感到与祈祷完全融为一体。希腊基督徒发现了一些东方宗教中已经实践了几个世纪的技术。他们将祈祷视为一种身心活动，而像奥古斯丁和格列高利这样的西方人则认为祈祷应该使灵魂从肉体中解脱出来。忏悔者马克西姆斯曾坚持认为：^“整个人应当成为神，因着道成肉身的神性的恩典而神化，凭着本性成为完整的人，身心合一；凭着恩典成为完整的神，身心合一。” ²¹静修者会体验到这种神化，如同涌入一股强大而令人信服的能量和清明，其力量和清明只能是神圣的。正如我们所见，希腊人将这种“神化”视为一种人类与生俱来的启迪。他们从塔博尔山上显圣容的基督身上汲取灵感，正如佛教徒从证得人性圆满的佛陀形象中获得启发一样。显圣容节在东正教中非常重要；它被称为“显现节”，即神的显现。与西方同胞不同，希腊人并不认为苦难、枯竭和荒凉是通往神性体验的必然前奏：这些仅仅是需要治愈的病症。希腊人没有所谓的“灵魂暗夜”崇拜。他们的主要精神象征是塔博尔山，而非客西马尼园和髑髅地。

Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this deification was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced consciously here below. He taught a method of concentration that involved breathing: as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: “Jesus Christ, Son of God”; they should exhale to the words: “have mercy upon us” Later hesychasts refined this exercise: contemplatives should sit with head and shoulders bowed, looking toward their heart or navel. They should breathe ever more slowly in order to direct their attention inward, to certain psychological foci like the heart. It was a rigorous discipline that must be used carefully; it could only be safely practiced under an expert director. Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and the hesychast would feel totally one with the prayer. Greek Christians had discovered for themselves techniques that had been practiced for centuries in the oriental religions. They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body. Maximus the Confessor had insisted: ^“The whole man should become God, deified by the grace of the God-become-man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole god, soul and body, by grace.”²¹ The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine. As we have seen, the Greeks saw this “deification” as an enlightenment that was natural to man. They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha, who had attained the fullest realization of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an “epiphany,” a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary.

然而，并非所有人都能达到这些更高的境界，但其他基督徒却能从圣像中窥见这种神秘体验的些许端倪。在西方，宗教艺术逐渐趋于具象化：它描绘耶稣或圣徒生平中的历史事件。然而，在拜占庭，圣像并非旨在描绘世间万物，而是试图以视觉形式展现静修者难以言喻的神秘体验，以启发非神秘主义者。正如英国历史学家彼得·布朗所解释的那样：“在整个东方基督教世界，圣像与异象相互印证。某种深层次的汇聚，汇聚于集体想象的焦点……确保了到了六世纪，超自然现象在梦境和每个人的想象中，都呈现出与艺术中常见的描绘相符的精确形态。圣像具有梦想成真的效力。” ²² 圣像并非旨在教导信徒，也并非旨在传达信息、思想或教义。它们是沉思（ theoria ）的焦点，为信徒们提供了一个了解神圣世界的窗口。

Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to represent anything in this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual form to inspire the nonmystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains, “Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one another. Some deep gathering into one focal point of the collective imagination … ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person’s imagination, in which it was commonly portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realized dream.”²² Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information, ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria) which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world.

然而，它们在拜占庭人对上帝的体验中变得如此核心，以至于到了八世纪，它们成为了希腊教会一场激烈教义争论的焦点。人们开始质疑，当艺术家描绘基督时，他究竟在画什么。描绘他的神性是不可能的，但如果艺术家声称他只是在描绘耶稣的人性，那么他是否犯了聂斯托利主义的罪——这种异端信仰耶稣的人性和神性截然不同吗？圣像破坏者想要彻底禁止圣像，但两位杰出的修士捍卫了圣像：一位是伯利恒附近马尔萨巴斯修道院的约翰·达马斯库斯（656-747），另一位是君士坦丁堡附近斯图迪乌斯修道院的狄奥多尔（759-826）。他们认为，圣像破坏者禁止描绘基督是错误的。自从道成肉身以来，物质世界和人体都被赋予了神圣的维度，艺术家可以描绘这种新型的神化人性。他同时也在描绘上帝的形象，因为道成肉身的基督本身就是上帝的完美象征。上帝无法被言语所定义，也无法被人类的概念所概括，但他可以通过艺术家的笔触或礼仪中的象征性动作来“描绘”。

They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the center of a passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning to ask what exactly the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was impossible to depict his divinity, but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the heretical belief that Jesus’ human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether, but icons were defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656–747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759–826), of the monastery of Studius near Constantinople. They argued that the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since the Incarnation, the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension, and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ the Logos was the icon of God par excellence. God could not be contained in words or summed up in human concepts, but he could be “described” by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy.

希腊人的虔诚如此依赖于圣像，以至于到了公元820年，圣像破坏运动最终被民众的拥护所击败。然而，这种认为上帝在某种意义上是可以描述的论断，并不意味着放弃了德尼的否定神学。在《圣像大辩护》一书中，修士尼基弗拉斯声称，圣像“表达了上帝的沉默，展现了超越存在的奥秘的不可言喻性。它们不间断地、无声地赞美上帝的良善，以那庄严而又三重光照的神学旋律。” ²³圣像并没有教导信徒教会的教义，也没有帮助他们形成清晰的信仰观念，而是让他们沉浸在一种神秘感之中。在描述这些宗教绘画的效果时，尼基弗拉斯只能将其与音乐的效果相提并论——音乐是最难以言喻的艺术形式，或许也是最直接的艺术形式。音乐传递情感和体验的方式超越了语言和概念。十九世纪，沃尔特·佩特断言所有艺术都力求达到音乐的境界；九世纪的拜占庭，希腊基督徒则认为神学力求达到圣像画的境界。他们发现，比起理性主义的论述，艺术作品更能表达上帝的形象。在经历了四、五世纪冗长繁复的基督论辩论之后，他们逐渐构建出一幅依赖于基督徒想象体验的上帝形象。

The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of Denys’s apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology for the Holy Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were “expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of God in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology.”²³ Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings, Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired to the condition of music; in ninth-century Byzantium, Greek Christians saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of God that depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians.

君士坦丁堡圣马克拉斯修道院院长西蒙（949-1022）对此做出了明确的阐述，他后来被称为“新神学家”。这种新型神学并不试图定义上帝。西蒙坚持认为，这样做是狂妄的；事实上，以任何方式谈论上帝都意味着“不可理解的事物是可以理解的”。 ²⁴这种“新”神学不以理性论证上帝的本质，而是依赖于直接的、个人的宗教体验。用概念来认识上帝是不可能的，仿佛他只是我们可以用观念来理解的另一个存在。上帝是一个奥秘。真正的基督徒是对上帝有意识的体验，上帝在基督的超凡人性中向世人显现。西蒙本人也曾因一次看似突如其来的经历而从世俗生活转向默想。起初他并不明白发生了什么，但渐渐地，他意识到自己正在被转化，仿佛被吸收进上帝自身的光芒之中。当然，这并非我们所知的“光”；它超越了“形式、形象或表象，只能通过祈祷以直觉的方式体验”。 ²⁵ 但这并非精英或僧侣的专属体验；基督在福音书中宣告的天国是与上帝的合一，每个人都可以在此时此地体验到，无需等到来世。

This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949–1022), Abbot of the small monastery of St. Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the “New Theologian.” This new type of theology made no attempt to define God. This, Symeon insisted, would be presumptuous; indeed, to speak about God in any way at all implied that “that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible.”²⁴ Instead of arguing rationally about God’s nature, the “new” theology relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just another being about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed himself in the transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to contemplation by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was of God himself. This was not light as we know it, of course; it was beyond “form, image or representation and could only be experienced intuitively, through prayer.”²⁵ But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a union with God that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life.

因此，对西蒙而言，上帝既是已知的，又是未知的；既是近的，又是远的。他没有试图用言语去描述“不可言喻的事物”这种不可能完成的任务，^而是敦促他的修士们专注于在他们自己的灵魂中体验到的、具有转化意义的现实。正如上帝在西蒙的一次异象中所说：“是的，我就是上帝，为了你而成为人。看哪，我创造了你，正如你所看到的，我还要使你成为上帝。”^上帝并非一个外在的、客观的事实，而是一种本质上主观的、个人的启迪。然而，西蒙拒绝谈论上帝并没有使他背离过去的教义。“新”神学牢牢地建立在教父们的教导之上。在他的《神圣之爱的赞歌》中，西蒙表达了古希腊关于人类神化的教义，正如阿塔纳修斯和马克西姆斯所描述的那样：

For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead of attempting the impossible task of describing “ineffable matters by words alone,”²⁶ he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon during one of his visions: “Yes, I am God, the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make you God.”²⁷ God was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment. Yet Symeon’s refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past. The “new” theology was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus:

定义促成这一转变的神是徒劳的，因为祂超越言语和描述。然而，作为一种在不违背人类完整性的前提下，圆满并转化人类的体验，“神”却是一个无可辩驳的现实。希腊人发展出了关于神的观念——例如三位一体和道成肉身——这些观念使他们与其他神有所区别。他们是一神论者，但他们的神秘主义者的实际体验与穆斯林和犹太人的神秘主义者有很多共同之处。

It was useless to define the God who affected this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity, “God” was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed ideas about God—such as the Trinity and the Incarnation—that separated them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews.

尽管先知穆罕默德的主要关注点在于建立一个公正的社会，但他和一些最亲密的同伴却都具有神秘主义倾向，穆斯林也很快发展出了自己独特的神秘主义传统。在八、九世纪，一种苦行主义的伊斯兰教与其他教派并存发展；这些苦行者与穆尔太齐赖派和什叶派一样，都关注着宫廷的财富以及早期穆斯林社群（乌玛）清苦生活方式的明显缺失。他们试图回归麦地那早期穆斯林的简朴生活，穿着据说是先知所钟爱的粗羊毛衣（阿拉伯语：SWF）。因此，他们被称为苏菲派。正如已故法国学者路易·马西尼翁所解释的那样，社会正义对他们的虔诚仍然至关重要：

Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily concerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined, and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favored by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained:

起初，苏菲派与其他教派有很多共同之处。例如，伟大的穆尔太齐赖派理性主义者瓦西里·伊本·阿塔（卒于748年）曾是麦地那苦行僧哈桑·巴士里（卒于728年）的弟子，后者后来被尊为苏菲主义的创始人之一。

At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism.

乌里玛们开始将伊斯兰教与其他宗教明确区分开来，视其为唯一真正的信仰，但苏菲派总体上仍然忠于《古兰经》中关于所有正统宗教合一的观点。例如，许多苏菲派尊崇耶稣为内在生活的先知。有些人甚至修改了清真言（作证词），将其改为：“万物非主，唯有真主，耶稣是真主的使者”，这在技术上是正确的，但却带有明显的挑衅意味。《古兰经》中描述的是一位公正的真主，令人敬畏，而早期女苦行者拉比娅（卒于公元801年）则以一种基督徒会感到熟悉的方式谈论爱：

The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other religions, seeing it as the one, true faith, but Sufis by and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly guided religion. Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to say: “There is no god but al-Lah and Jesus is his Messenger,” which was technically correct but intentionally provocative. Where the Koran speaks of a God of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d. 801) spoke of love, in a way that Christians would have found familiar:

这与她著名的祈祷文非常接近：“真主啊！如果我因惧怕地狱而敬拜你，请将我投入地狱；如果我因渴望天堂而敬拜你，请将我排除在天堂之外；但如果我因你本身而敬拜你，请不要收回你永恒的美丽！” ³¹对上帝的爱成为了苏菲主义的标志。苏菲派或许受到了近东基督教苦行僧的影响，但穆罕默德仍然是至关重要的影响因素。他们渴望获得与穆罕默德接受启示时类似的与上帝相遇的体验。当然，他们也深受穆罕默德神秘升天的启发，这成为了他们自身与上帝相遇体验的典范。

This is close to her famous prayer: “O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!”³¹ The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East, but Muhammad remained a crucial influence. They hoped to have an experience of God that was similar to that of Muhammad when he had received his revelations. Naturally, they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their own experience of God.

他们还发展出一些技巧和修行方法，帮助世界各地的神秘主义者达到另一种意识状态。苏菲派在伊斯兰教法的基本要求之外，增加了斋戒、守夜和吟诵真主之名等修行方式。这些修行方式有时会导致一些看似怪异和放纵的行为，这样的神秘主义者被称为“醉酒的”苏菲。其中第一位是阿布·亚齐德·比斯塔米（卒于公元874年），他像拉比雅一样，以爱人般的姿态接近真主。他认为自己应该像在一段人间恋情中取悦女子一样，努力取悦真主，牺牲自己的需求和欲望，从而与至爱合而为一。然而，他为了达到这一目标而采取的内省修行方式，却使他超越了这种个人化的上帝观。当他接近自身身份的核心时，他感到自己与上帝之间没有任何阻隔；事实上，他所理解的一切“自我”似乎都已消融：

They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics all over the world to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behavior which seemed bizarre and unrestrained, and such mystics were known as “drunken” Sufis. The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 874), who, like Rabiah, approached God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please al-Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own needs and desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalized conception of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt that nothing stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that he understood as “self” seemed to have melted away:

然而，这并非一个外在于人类、与人类格格不入的神祇：人们发现，上帝神秘地与人类最内在的自我合而为一。自我的系统性消解使人产生一种融入更宏大存在的感受。难以言喻的现实。这种湮灭的状态（梵语： 'fana ）成为苏菲理想的核心。比斯塔米对清真言（Shahadah）进行了彻底的重新诠释，如果不是被众多穆斯林视为《古兰经》所教导的伊斯兰的真实体验，这种诠释可能会被视为亵渎神明。

Yet again, this was no external deity “out there,” alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic destruction of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality. This state of annihilation (’fana) became central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, had it not been recognized by so many other Muslims as an authentic experience of that islam commanded by the Koran.

另一些被称为“清醒”苏菲派的神秘主义者则更倾向于一种不那么奢华的灵修方式。巴格达的朱奈德（卒于910年）奠定了未来所有伊斯兰神秘主义的基础，他认为比斯塔米的极端主义可能很危险。他教导说，湮灭（ Jana）之后必须有复兴（ Baqa），即回归到更高层次的自我。与神的合一不应摧毁我们与生俱来的能力，而应使其得以充分发挥：一位苏菲如果能够剥离遮蔽的自我中心主义，发现自身内在的神圣存在，就会体验到更深刻的自我认知和自我控制。他会变得更加完整，更像一个完整的人。因此，当苏菲体验到湮灭（Fana）和复兴（Baqa）时，他们就达到了一种希腊基督徒所谓的“神化”状态。朱奈德将整个苏菲的追求视为回归人类在创世之日的原始状态：回归到神所设想的理想人性。他也在回归其存在的源头。分离和疏离的体验对于苏菲派而言，与柏拉图式或诺斯替式的体验一样至关重要；它或许与弗洛伊德和克莱因学派今天所说的“分离”并无太大区别，尽管精神分析学家将其归因于非有神论的根源。朱奈德教导说，通过在像他一样的苏菲大师（pir）的专业指导下进行严谨细致的修行，穆斯林可以与造物主重新合一，并恢复到最初感受到上帝临在的那种感觉——正如《古兰经》所说，当他从亚当的腰间被取出时，他便体验到了这种感觉。这将是分离和悲伤的终结，是与更深层次的自我重聚，而这个自我也是他或她注定要成为的自我。上帝并非一个独立于世的、外在的现实和审判者，而是以某种方式与每个人存在的根基融为一体：

Other mystics, known as the “sober” Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), who mapped out the ground plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al-Bistami’s extremism could be dangerous. He taught that Jana (annihilation) must be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self. Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfill them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. He would become more fully human. When they experienced ’fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek Christian would call “deification.” Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi quest as a return to man’s primordial state on the day of creation: he was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience; it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the “separation” of which Freudians and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this to a nontheistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work under the expert guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself, al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and achieve that original sense of God’s immediate presence that he had experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam’s loins. It would be the end of separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the self he or she was meant to be. God was not a separate, external reality and judge but somehow one with the ground of each person’s being:

对统一的强调可以追溯到《古兰经》中的认主独一（tawhid）理想：通过凝聚自己分散的自我，神秘主义者将在个人整合中体验神圣的存在。

The emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the divine presence in personal integration.

朱奈德深知神秘主义的危险。未经训练的人，没有得到圣贤的指导和严格的苏菲训练，很容易误解神秘主义者的狂喜，对他们所说的“与神合一”产生非常肤浅的理解。像比斯塔米那样夸张的宣称，无疑会激起当权者的愤怒。在早期阶段，苏菲主义还属于少数派运动，乌里玛（伊斯兰教法学家）常常将其视为一种不正统的创新。然而，朱奈德的著名弟子侯赛因·伊本·曼苏尔（通常被称为哈拉吉，意为“梳毛工”）却抛开了所有顾虑，最终为他的神秘信仰殉道。他游历伊拉克，宣扬推翻哈里发政权、建立新的社会秩序，最终被当局逮捕，并像他崇拜的耶稣一样被钉死在十字架上。在极度狂喜中，哈拉吉高声呼喊：“我就是真理！”福音书记载，耶稣也曾如此宣称，称自己是道路、真理和生命。古兰经多次谴责基督教关于上帝在基督身上化身的信仰是亵渎神明，因此，穆斯林对哈拉吉狂喜的呼喊感到震惊也就不足为奇了。 “真理”（ Al-Haqq）是上帝的尊名之一，任何凡人妄称自己拥有此尊名都是偶像崇拜。哈拉吉表达的是他与上帝如此紧密相连的感受，这种感觉如同身份认同。正如他在一首诗中所写：

Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of a pir and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement, and the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd’s famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the winds, however, and became a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus. In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: “I am the Truth!” According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God’s Incarnation in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al-Hallaj’s ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God, and it was idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems:

这是一种大胆的自我毁灭和与真主合一的表达，他的导师朱奈德称之为“法纳”。哈拉吉被指控亵渎神明时拒绝认罪，最终圣洁地死去。

It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called ’fana. Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death.

哈拉吉高呼“我即真理！”表明，神秘主义者的神并非客观存在，而是具有深刻的主观性。后来，加扎利辩称，他并非亵渎神明，只是不明智地宣扬了一种深奥的真理，可能会误导未入门者。因为除了真主（安拉）之外别无他物——正如清真言所言——所有人本质上都是神性的。《古兰经》教导说，真主按照自己的形象创造了亚当，以便他能够像照镜子一样审视自己。 ³⁶这就是真主命令天使们俯首敬拜第一个人的原因。苏菲派认为，基督徒的错误在于假定一个人包含了神性的全部化身。一位重获对真主最初认知的神秘主义者，重新发现了自身内在的神圣形象，如同创世之日所显现的那样。苏菲派所珍视的圣训（圣训）展现了真主如何如此紧密地吸引穆斯林，以至于他似乎化身为每一位仆人：“当我爱他时，我便成为他聆听的耳朵，他观看的眼睛，他抓握的手，以及他行走的脚。” 哈拉吉的故事揭示了神秘主义者与宗教权威之间可能存在的深刻对立，因为他们对真主和启示的理解截然不同。对神秘主义者而言，启示是发生在自身灵魂深处的事件；而对一些乌里玛等更为传统的人而言，启示则是牢牢固定于过去的事件。然而，我们已经看到，在十一世纪，像伊本·西那和安萨里这样的穆斯林哲学家发现，对真主的客观描述并不令人满意，于是转向了神秘主义。安萨里使苏菲主义为当时的统治阶级所接受，并证明它是穆斯林灵性最纯粹的形式。十二世纪，伊朗哲学家叶海亚·苏赫拉瓦尔迪和西班牙出生的穆伊德·阿丁也对苏菲主义产生了影响。伊本·阿拉比将伊斯兰教的哲学与神秘主义密不可分地联系在一起，并将苏菲派所体验到的神性奉为伊斯兰帝国许多地区的规范。然而，与哈拉吉一样，苏赫拉瓦尔迪也于1191年在阿勒颇被乌里玛处死，原因至今不明。他毕生致力于将他所谓的原始“东方”宗教与伊斯兰教联系起来，从而完成了伊本·西那提出的计划。他声称古代世界的所有圣贤都宣扬着同一教义。最初，这一教义启示给了赫尔墨斯（苏赫拉瓦尔迪认为赫尔墨斯就是《古兰经》中的先知伊德里斯或《圣经》中的以诺）；在希腊世界，它通过柏拉图和毕达哥拉斯传播；在中东，它则通过琐罗亚斯德教的贤士传播。然而，自亚里士多德以来，这种哲学思想一直被一种更为狭隘的理性哲学所掩盖，但它却在智者间秘密传承，最终经由比斯塔米和哈拉吉传至苏赫拉瓦尔迪本人。这种永恒的哲学既神秘又充满想象力，但并不意味着放弃理性。苏赫拉瓦尔迪的理性严谨程度不亚于法拉比，但他同时也强调直觉在探求真理中的重要性。正如《古兰经》所教导的，一切真理都来自真主，应当在任何地方寻求真理。真理既存在于异教和琐罗亚斯德教中，也存在于一神论传统中。与容易引发宗派纷争的教条式宗教不同，神秘主义常常认为通往真主的道路如同人一样多。苏菲主义尤其发展出对其他信仰的卓越理解。

Al-Hallaj’s cry ana al-Haqq: “I am the Truth!” shows that the God of the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly subjective. Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated. Because there is no reality but al-Lah—as the Shahadah maintains—all men are essentially divine. The Koran taught that God had created Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate himself as in a mirror.³⁶ That is why he ordered the angels to bow down and worship the first man. The mistake of the Christians had been to assume that one man had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would argue. A mystic who had regained his original vision of God had rediscovered the divine image within himself, as it had appeared on the day of creation. The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi) beloved by the Sufis shows God drawing a Muslim toward him so closely that he seems to have become incarnate in each one of his servants: “When I love him, I become his Ear through which he hears, his Eye with which he sees, his Hand with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he walks.” The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that can exist between the mystic and the religious establishment who have different notions of God and revelation. For the mystic the revelation is an event that happens within his own soul, while for more conventional people like some of the ulema it is an event that is firmly fixed in the past. We have seen, however, that during the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali himself had found that objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory and had turned toward mysticism. Al-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable to the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic form of Muslim spirituality. During the twelfth century the Iranian philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi and the Spanish-born Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi linked Islamic Falsafah indissolubly with mysticism and made the God experienced by the Sufis normative in many parts of the Islamic empire. Like al-Hallaj, however, Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191, for reasons that remain obscure. He had made it his life’s work to link what he called the original “Oriental” religion with Islam, thus completing the project that Ibn Sina had proposed. He claimed that all the sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine. Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom Suhrawardi identified with the prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible); in the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras and in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi. Since Aristotle, however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral philosophy, but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj. This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as al-Farabi, but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition. Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others.

苏赫拉瓦尔迪常被称为“伊什拉克长老”（Sheikh al-Ishraq）或“启蒙大师”。如同希腊人一样，他以光明的视角体验上帝。在阿拉伯语中，“伊什拉克”（ishraq）既指来自东方的第一缕晨光，也指启蒙：因此，“东方”并非指地理位置，而是光明和能量的源泉。在苏赫拉瓦尔迪的东方信仰中，人类对自身的起源依稀记得，在这充满阴影的世界中感到不安，渴望回归最初的居所。苏赫拉瓦尔迪声称，他的哲学将帮助穆斯林找到真正的方向，并通过想象力净化他们内在的永恒智慧。

Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that issues from the East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore, is not the geographical location but the source of light and energy. In Suhrawardi’s Oriental faith, therefore, human beings dimly remember their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would help Muslims to find their true orientation, to purify the eternal wisdom within them by means of the imagination.

苏赫拉瓦尔迪极其复杂的体系旨在将世界所有宗教见解融会贯通，形成一种精神宗教。真理必须在任何地方寻求。因此，他的哲学将前伊斯兰时期的伊朗宇宙论与托勒密的行星体系和新柏拉图主义的流溢论联系起来。然而，此前从未有其他费拉苏夫（Faylasuf）提出过类似的观点。苏赫拉瓦尔迪大量引用《古兰经》。当他探讨宇宙论时，他的主要兴趣并非在于解释宇宙的物理起源。在他的代表作《启迪智慧》（Hiqmat al-Ishraq）中，苏赫拉瓦尔迪首先探讨了物理学和自然科学的问题，但这仅仅是他作品中神秘主义部分的序曲。与伊本·西那一样，他对哲学（Falsafah）完全理性客观的取向感到不满，尽管他确实认为理性思考和形而上学思辨在理解整体现实中占有一席之地。在他看来，真正的圣贤应在哲学和神秘主义方面都卓有成就。世间始终存在着这样的圣贤。苏赫拉瓦尔迪的理论与什叶派伊玛目学非常接近，他认为这位精神领袖是真正的极点（qutb），没有他的存在，世界将无法继续存在，即便他隐居于世。苏赫拉瓦尔迪的伊什拉基神秘主义至今仍在伊朗流传。它之所以被认为是一种秘传体系，并非因为它的排他性，而是因为它需要像伊斯玛仪派和苏菲派那样的精神和想象力训练。

Suhrawardi’s immensely complex system was an attempt to link all the religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequently his philosophy linked the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology, Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical origins of the universe. In his masterwork The Wisdom of Illumination (Hiqmat al-Ishraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of physics and natural science, but this was only a prelude to the mystical part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had their place in the perception of total reality. The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and mysticism. There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual leader was the true pole (qutb) without whose presence the world could not continue to exist, even if he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi’s Ishraqi mysticism is still practiced in Iran. It is an esoteric system not because it is exclusive but because it requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort undergone by Ismailis and Sufis.

或许希腊人会说苏拉瓦尔迪的体系是教条式的，而非宣讲式的。他试图发现所有宗教和哲学的核心——想象力，尽管他坚持认为理性不足以解决问题，但他从未否认理性探索最深奥奥秘的权利。真理必须在科学理性主义和深奥的神秘主义中寻求；感性必须接受批判性智慧的熏陶和启迪。

The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi’s system was dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting to discover the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied its right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be educated and informed by the critical intelligence.

正如其名所示，伊什拉基哲学的核心是光的象征，它被视为上帝的完美同义词。它（至少在十二世纪！）是无形的、不可定义的，但同时也是世间最显而易见的真理：它完全不言自明，无需任何定义，却被所有人视为生命得以存在的要素。它无所不在：物质世界的一切光辉都直接来源于光，一个外在于物质世界的源泉。在苏赫拉瓦尔迪的流溢论宇宙论中，“光之光”对应于费拉苏夫的必然存在，它极其简单。它生成了一系列层级递减的较小光；每一束光都意识到自身对“光之光”的依赖，并发展出一个影子自我，这个影子自我构成了一个物质领域的源泉，对应于托勒密体系中的一个领域。这是一种对人类困境的隐喻。我们每个人体内都存在着类似的光明与黑暗的结合：光明或灵魂是由圣灵（在伊本·西那的体系中也被称为天使加百列，即光明）赋予胚胎的。我们的世界）。灵魂渴望与更高的光明世界合而为一，如果它得到当时的库特布圣人或其门徒的正确指导，甚至可以在人世间瞥见它。

As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God. It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable, yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi’s emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corresponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognizing its dependency upon the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar combination of light and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina’s scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below.

苏赫拉瓦尔迪在《智慧论》（Hiqmat）中描述了他自己的顿悟。他一直痴迷于知识的认识论问题，却始终毫无进展：书本知识对他毫无启发。后来，他看到了伊玛目、库特布（qutb，灵魂的治愈者）的幻象：

Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls:

觉醒或启迪的过程显然与预言那种令人痛苦、激烈的启示截然不同。它更接近佛陀宁静的觉悟：神秘主义将一种更为平和的灵性引入到神的宗教之中。启迪并非来自与外在现实的碰撞，而是来自神秘主义者自身的内心。这里没有事实的灌输。相反，人类想象力的运用使人们能够回归神，引领他们进入“纯粹意象的世界”（alam al-mithal） 。

The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal, the world of pure images.

苏赫拉瓦尔迪借鉴了古伊朗关于原型世界的信仰，认为世俗物质世界（getik ）中的每个人和物在天界（menok）中都有其精确的对应物。神秘主义复兴了那些表面上已被神权宗教所抛弃的古老神话。在苏赫拉瓦尔迪的体系中，天界（menok ）演变为“阿拉姆·米塔尔”（alam al-mithal），它成为介于我们世界和神界之间的中间领域。这个领域无法通过理性或感官感知。正是创造性的想象力使我们能够发现隐藏的原型领域，正如对《古兰经》的象征性解读揭示了其真正的精神含义一样。“阿拉姆·米塔尔”与伊斯玛仪派对伊斯兰精神历史的理解（即世俗事件的真正意义）或我们在上一章讨论过的伊本·西那的天使学非常接近。对于所有未来的伊斯兰神秘主义者来说，这将是诠释他们的经历和幻象的关键途径。苏赫拉瓦尔迪正在研究那些如此引人注目的幻象。在许多不同的文化中，无论是萨满、神秘主义者还是狂喜者，都持有类似的观点。近年来，人们对这种现象产生了浓厚的兴趣。荣格的集体无意识概念则是一种更为科学的尝试，旨在研究人类共同的想象体验。其他学者，例如罗马尼亚裔美国宗教哲学家米尔恰·伊利亚德，则试图阐明古代诗人的史诗和某些类型的童话故事是如何源于狂喜之旅和神秘体验的^。38

Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had ostensibly abandoned. The menok, which in Suhrawardi’s scheme became the alam al-mithal, was now an intermediate realm that existed between our world and God’s. This could not be perceived by means of reason or by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled us to dis-cover the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic interpretation of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina’s angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures. There has recently been much interest in this phenomenon. Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars, such as the Rumanian-American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights.³⁸

苏拉瓦尔迪坚持认为，神秘主义者的幻象和经文中的象征——例如天堂、地狱和末日审判——与我们在这个世界所经历的现象一样真实，但方式却截然不同。它们无法通过经验来证明，只能通过训练有素的想象力来辨别，这种想象力使先知能够看到尘世现象的精神层面。对于任何没有接受过必要训练的人来说，这种体验都是荒谬的，正如佛教的觉悟只有在进行必要的道德和精神修行之后才能体验一样。我们所有的思想、观念、欲望、梦境和幻象都与“阿拉姆·米塔尔”（alam al-mithal）中的现实相对应。例如，先知穆罕默德在夜视中觉醒，进入了这个中间世界，并将他带到了神圣世界的门槛。苏拉瓦尔迪还会声称，犹太宝座神秘主义者的幻象发生在他们通过精神专注的修行学会进入“阿拉姆·米塔尔”之后。因此，通往上帝的道路并非像费拉苏夫一家所认为的那样仅仅通过理性，而是通过创造性的想象力，即神秘主义的领域。

Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of scripture—such as Heaven, Hell and the Last Judgment—were as real as the phenomena we experience in this world, but not in the same way. They could not be empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of earthly phenomena. This experience was nonsensical to anybody who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises had been undertaken. All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal. The Prophet Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world. Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration. The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic.

今天，如果一位西方著名神学家提出上帝在某种深刻意义上是想象的产物，许多人会感到震惊。然而，显而易见的是，想象力是主要的宗教能力。让-保罗·萨特将其定义为思考不存在之物的能力。³⁹人类是唯一能够设想不存在之物或尚未存在但仅仅是可能之物的动物。因此，想象力是我们取得科学技术、艺术和宗教等重大成就的根源。无论如何定义，上帝的概念或许是缺席现实的最佳例证，尽管它本身存在诸多问题，却在数千年来持续激励着人们。我们只能通过符号来理解上帝——祂既无法被感官感知，也无法被逻辑证明——而诠释这些符号正是想象力的主要功能。苏拉瓦尔迪试图用想象力来解释那些产生了至关重要影响的符号。即使它们所指涉的现实仍然难以捉摸，它们依然与人类生活息息相关。符号可以定义为我们能够用感官感知或用思维把握的对象或概念，但我们从中看到的并非其本身。仅凭理性无法让我们在特定的、暂时的对象中感知到特殊性、普遍性或永恒性。这正是创造性想象力的任务，神秘主义者如同艺术家一样，将他们的洞见归功于此。正如在艺术领域一样，最有效的宗教符号源于对人类境况的深刻理解和认知。苏赫拉瓦尔迪是一位才华横溢的形而上学家，他以极其优美的阿拉伯文写作，同时也是一位富有创造力的艺术家和神秘主义者。他将看似毫不相关的事物——科学与神秘主义、异教哲学与一神论宗教——巧妙地融合在一起，帮助穆斯林创造了他们自己的符号，并在生活中找到了新的意义和价值。

Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not.³⁹ Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive. A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the human condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together—science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion—he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning and significance in life.

比苏赫拉瓦尔迪更具影响力的是穆伊德·丁·伊本·阿拉比（1165-1240），他的一生或许可以被视为东西方分道扬镳的象征。他的父亲是伊本·鲁什德的朋友，两人仅有一次见面，伊本·鲁什德便被这位少年的虔诚深深打动。然而，在一次重病中，伊本·阿拉比皈依了苏菲主义，并在三十岁时离开欧洲前往中东。他完成了朝觐，并在克尔白进行了两年的祈祷和冥想，最终定居在幼发拉底河畔的马拉蒂亚。他常被尊称为“谢赫·阿克巴”（意为“伟大的导师”），对穆斯林的真主观念产生了深远的影响，但他的思想并未影响西方，西方认为伊斯兰哲学已随着伊本·鲁什德的离世而终结。西方基督教世界接受了伊本·鲁什德的亚里士多德式上帝，而直到最近，伊斯兰教世界的大部分地区仍然选择神秘主义者富有想象力的上帝。

Even more influential than Suhrawardi was Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), whose life we can, perhaps, see as a symbol of the parting of the ways between East and West. His father was a friend of Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on the one occasion when they met. During a severe illness, Ibn al-Arabi was converted to Sufism, however, and at the age of thirty he left Europe for the Middle East. He made the hajj and spent two years praying and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at Malatya on the Euphrates. Frequently called Sheikh al-Akbah, the Great Master, he profoundly affected the Muslim conception of God, but his thought did not influence the West, which imagined that Islamic philosophy had ended with Ibn Rushd. Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative God of the mystics.

1201年，伊本·阿拉比在环绕克尔白时，经历了一次对他影响深远的异象：他看到一位名叫尼扎姆的年轻女子，周身环绕着神圣的光环，他意识到她是神圣智慧索菲亚的化身。这次顿悟让他明白，如果我们仅仅依赖哲学的理性论证，就无法爱上帝。哲学强调了真主的绝对超越性，并提醒我们没有任何事物可以与他相似。我们怎能爱上这样一个如此超然的存在呢？然而，我们可以爱上我们在造物中看到的上帝：“如果你爱一个存在是因为他的美丽，那么你爱的正是上帝，因为他是至美的存在，”他在《麦加启示录》（ Futuhat al-Makkiyah ）中解释道。“因此在所有方面，爱的对象唯有真主。” ⁴⁰ 清真言提醒我们，除了真主之外，别无神明，别无绝对的实在。因此，除了真主之外，别无美。我们无法亲眼见到真主，但我们可以通过他选择在尼扎姆这样的造物身上显现的方式来认识他，尼扎姆激发了我们心中的爱。的确，这位神秘主义者有责任为自己创造顿悟，以便真正看清像尼扎姆这样的女孩。爱本质上是对某种缺失之物的渴望；这就是为什么我们人类的许多爱情总是令人失望。尼扎姆已成为“我追寻和希望的对象，至纯至洁的处女”。正如他在《迪万》（一部爱情诗集）的序言中所解释的那样：

In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn al-Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly aura and he realized that she was an incarnation of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This epiphany made him realize that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of philosophy. Falsafah emphasized the utter transcendence of al-Lah and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures: “If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for he is the Beautiful Being,” he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Meccan Revelations). “Thus in all its aspects, the object of love is God alone.”⁴⁰ The Shahadah reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God himself, but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such creatures as Nizam, who inspire love in our hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies for himself in order to see a girl like Nizam as she really was. Love is essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had become “the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure.” As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan, a collection of love poems:

丰富的想象力将尼扎姆塑造成了神的化身。

The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of God.

大约八十年后，年轻的但丁·阿利吉耶里在佛罗伦萨见到贝阿特丽切·波尔蒂纳里时，也有过类似的经历。他一见到她，就感到自己的灵魂剧烈颤抖，仿佛听到它呼喊：“看哪，一位比我更强大的神，前来统治我。” 从那一刻起，但丁便被他对贝阿特丽切的爱所支配，这种爱“因我想象力赋予他的力量”而达到了极致。 ⁴²贝阿特丽切始终是但丁心中神圣之爱的化身，在《神曲》中，他展现了这种爱如何引领他，通过一段穿越地狱、炼狱和天堂的想象之旅，最终抵达上帝的显现。但丁的诗作灵感来源于穆斯林对穆罕默德升天的记载；当然，他对创造性想象力的看法与伊本·阿拉比的观点相似。但丁认为，想象力并非如亚里士多德所言，仅仅是将源于对世俗世界的感知的意象组合起来；这其中一部分灵感来自上帝：

Some eighty years later, the young Dante Alighieri had a similar experience in Florence when he saw Beatrice Portinari. As soon as he caught sight of her, he felt his spirit tremble violently and seemed to hear it cry: “Behold a god more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.” From that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery “owing to the power which my imagination gave him.”⁴² Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante, and in The Divine Comedy, he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, to a vision of God. Dante’s poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that imaginativa simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane world, as Aristotle had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from God:

在整首诗中，但丁逐渐摒弃了感官和视觉意象。对地狱生动形象的描绘让位于攀登炼狱山到达人间天堂的艰难而充满情感的旅程。在天堂，贝阿特丽切责备他将她的肉身视为目的本身：他本应将她视为一个象征或化身，指引他远离尘世，走向神。天堂中几乎没有任何对肉体的描写；即使是那些蒙福的灵魂也难以捉摸，这提醒我们，没有任何人格能够成为人类渴望的最终对象。最终，冷静的理性意象表达了上帝的绝对超越性，祂超越一切想象。有人指责但丁在《天堂篇》中对上帝描绘了一幅冷漠的画像，但这种抽象的表达方式提醒我们，最终我们对上帝一无所知。

Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that no human personality can become the final object of human yearning. Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso, but the abstraction reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him.

伊本·阿拉比也深信想象力是上帝赋予的能力。当一位神秘主义者为自己创造顿悟时，他实际上是将一种在原型领域中更为完美的现实带到了尘世。当我们从他人身上看到神性时，我们是在运用想象力去揭示真实的现实：“上帝创造万物如同面纱，”他解释道，“认识到它们本质的人将被引向祂，而将它们视为真实的人则会被拒之门外。” ⁴⁴因此——这似乎是苏菲主义的惯常做法——最初以人为中心的高度个人化的灵性，最终引导伊本·阿拉比走向了一种超越个人层面的上帝观。女性的形象对他而言依然至关重要：他认为女性是神圣智慧索菲亚最有力的化身，因为她们激发了男性心中最终指向上帝的爱。诚然，这是一种非常男性化的观点，但这却是试图将女性维度带入一个通常被认为是完全男性化的神的宗教中。

Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty. When a mystic created an epiphany for himself, he was bringing to birth here below a reality that existed more perfectly in the realm of archetypes. When we saw the divine in other people, we were making an imaginative effort to uncover the true reality: “God made the creatures like veils,” he explained, “He who knows them as such is led back to Him, but he who takes them as real is barred from His presence.”⁴⁴ Thus—as seemed to be the way of Sufism—what started as a highly personalized spirituality, centering on a human being, led Ibn al-Arabi to a transpersonal conception of God. The image of the female remained important to him: he believed that women were the most potent incarnations of Sophia, the divine Wisdom, because they inspired a love in men that was ultimately directed toward God. Admittedly, this is a very male view, but it was an attempt to bring a female dimension to the religion of a God who was often conceived as wholly masculine.

伊本·阿拉比不相信他所认识的上帝具有客观存在。尽管他是一位技艺精湛的形而上学家，但他并不认为上帝的存在能够通过逻辑证明。他喜欢自称是赫兹尔的门徒。赫兹尔是《古兰经》中出现的一位神秘人物，他是摩西的精神导师，并将外在的律法带给了以色列人。上帝赋予了赫兹尔关于自身的特殊知识，因此摩西恳求他指导自己，但赫兹尔告诉他，他无法接受这种指导，因为它超出了他自身的宗教经验。 ⁴⁵ 试图理解我们未曾亲身体验过的宗教“信息”是徒劳的。赫兹尔（Khidr）这个名字似乎意为“绿色之人”，暗示着他的智慧永葆新鲜，生生不息。即使是像摩西这样地位崇高的先知，也未必能够理解宗教的深奥形式，因为在《古兰经》中，他发现自己确实无法接受赫兹尔的教导方式。这一奇特的插曲似乎表明，宗教的外在形式并不总是与其精神或神秘本质相符。像乌里玛（伊斯兰教法学家）这样的人，或许无法理解像伊本·阿拉比这样的苏菲派的伊斯兰教义。穆斯林传统将赫兹尔视为所有寻求神秘真理之人的导师，这种真理本质上优于并不同于字面意义上的外在形式。他引导他的门徒去感知一个与其他人相同的上帝，而是引导他们去感知一个在最深层次意义上具有主观性的上帝。

Ibn al-Arabi did not believe that the God he knew had an objective existence. Even though he was a skilled metaphysician, he did not believe that God’s existence could be proved by logic. He liked to call himself a disciple of Khidr, a name given to the mysterious figure who appears in the Koran as the spiritual director of Moses, who brought the external Law to the Israelites. God has given Khidr a special knowledge of himself, so Moses begs him for instruction, but Khidr tells him that he will not be able to put up with this, since it lies outside his own religious experience.⁴⁵ It is no good trying to understand religious “information” that we have not experienced ourselves. The name Khidr seems to have meant “the Green One,” indicating that his wisdom was ever fresh and eternally renewable. Even a prophet of Moses’ stature cannot necessarily comprehend esoteric forms of religion, for, in the Koran, he finds that indeed he cannot put up with Khidr’s method of instruction. The meaning of this strange episode seems to suggest that the external trappings of a religion do not always correspond to its spiritual or mystical element. People, such as the ulema, might be unable to understand the Islam of a Sufi like Ibn al-Arabi. Muslim tradition makes Khidr the master of all who seek a mystic truth, which is inherently superior to and quite different from the literal, external forms. He does not lead his disciple to a perception of a God which is the same as everybody else’s but to a God who is in the deepest sense of the word subjective.

赫兹尔对伊斯玛仪派也十分重要。尽管伊本·阿拉比是逊尼派穆斯林，但他的教义与伊斯玛仪派非常接近，并随后被纳入他们的神学体系——这再次证明了神秘宗教能够超越教派分歧。与伊斯玛仪派一样，伊本·阿拉比强调上帝的悲悯之心（pathos），这与哲学家们所信奉的上帝的冷漠无情（apatheia）形成了鲜明的对比。神秘主义者的上帝渴望被他的造物所认识。伊斯玛仪派认为，名词“伊拉”（ilah，意为上帝）源于阿拉伯语词根“WLH”，意为悲伤、叹息。正如圣训中上帝所说：“我曾是隐藏的宝藏，我渴望被认识。于是我创造了万物^，以便被它们所认识。” 上帝悲伤并无理性证据；我们唯有通过自身对某种事物的渴望才能知晓它的存在，这种渴望既能满足我们最深切的愿望，又能解释人生的悲剧与痛苦。既然我们是按着神的形象所造，就必然反映出神——至高无上的原型。因此，我们对称之为“神”的现实的渴望，必然反映出对神之悲悯的共鸣。伊本·阿拉比想象着孤独的神发出渴望的叹息，但这叹息（nafas rahmani）并非自怜自艾的表达。它蕴含着一种积极的创造力，创造了我们整个宇宙；它也孕育了人类，人类成为了逻各斯（logoi），即向神自身表达的语言。由此可见，每个人都是隐秘之神的独特显现，以一种独特且不可复制的方式展现着祂。

Khidr was also important to the Ismailis. Despite the fact that Ibn al-Arabi was a Sunni, his teachings were very close to Ismailism and were subsequently incorporated into their theology—yet another instance of mystical religion being able to transcend sectarian divisions. Like the Ismailis, Ibn al-Arabi stressed the pathos of God, which was in sharp contrast to the apatheia of the God of the philosophers. The God of the mystics yearned to be known by his creatures. The Ismailis believed that the noun ilah (god) sprang from the Arabic root WLH: to be sad, to sigh for.⁴⁶ As the Sacred Hadith had made God say: “I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them.” There is no rational proof of God’s sadness; we know it only by our own longing for something to fulfill our deepest desires and to explain the tragedy and pain of life. Since we are created in God’s image, we must reflect God, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call “God” must, therefore, mirror a sympathy with the pathos of God. Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing, but this sigh (nafas rahmani) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings, who became logoi, words that express God to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner.

这些神圣的逻各斯都是上帝自称的名字，祂在每一次显现中都完全临在。上帝无法用任何一种人类的表达方式来概括，因为神圣的本质是无穷无尽的。由此可见，上帝在我们每个人身上所启示的都是独一无二的，不同于其他无数同样是祂的道（logoi）的男女所认识的上帝。我们只能认识我们自己的^“上帝”，因为我们无法客观地体验祂；我们不可能以与其他人相同的方式认识祂。正如伊本·阿拉比所说：“每个存在都只有他特定的主作为自己的神；他不可能拥有全部。”他喜欢引用圣训： “默想上帝的恩典，但不要默想祂的本质（al-Dhat）。” ⁴⁷上帝的全部实在是不可知的；我们必须专注于在我们自身存在中听到的特定圣言。伊本·阿拉比也喜欢称上帝为“云”（ al-Ama）或“盲目” ⁴⁸ ，以强调祂的不可接近性。但这些人类的道（logoi）也向他们自己揭示了隐秘的上帝。这是一个双向的过程：上帝渴望被世人所知，而祂的显现者们则将祂从孤独中解救出来。每个向世人展现祂的人，都抚慰了那不为人知的上帝的忧伤；同样，每个人心中显现的上帝也渴望回归本源，这种神圣的乡愁激发了我们自身的向往。

Each one of these divine logoi are the names that God has called himself, making himself totally present in each one of his epiphanies. God cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It also follows that the revelation that God has made in each one of us is unique, different from the God known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his logoi. We will only know our own ^“God” since we cannot experience him objectively; it is impossible to know him in the same way as other people. As Ibn al-Arabi said: “Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole.” He liked to quote the hadith: “Meditate upon God’s blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat).”⁴⁷ The whole reality of God is unknowable; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being. Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama, “the Cloud” or “The Blindness”⁴⁸ to emphasize his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself. It is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our own longing.

神性和人性因此是赋予整个宇宙生命的神圣生命的两个方面。这种见解与希腊人对耶稣道成肉身的理解并无二致，但伊本·阿拉比无法接受任何一个人，无论多么圣洁，都能表达上帝的无限本质。相反，他认为每个人都是神圣的独特化身。然而，他确实发展出了“完美之人”（ insan i-kamil ）的象征，这种人体现了每一代人所拥有的启示之神的奥秘，以造福同时代的人，尽管他当然并非体现了上帝的全部本质或其隐藏的本质。先知穆罕默德是他那个时代的完美之人，也是神圣性的一个特别有效的象征。

Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar to the Greek understanding of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine. Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man (insan i-kamil) who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of God or his hidden essence. The Prophet Muhammad had been the Perfect Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine.

这种内省式的、充满想象力的神秘主义，是对自我深处存在根基的探寻。它使神秘主义者摒弃了那些教条式宗教所特有的确定性。既然每个人都对上帝有着独特的体验，那么任何一种宗教都无法表达神圣奥秘的全部。不存在所有人都必须认同的关于上帝的客观真理；因为上帝超越了人格的范畴，所以预测他的行为和倾向是不可能的。由此产生的任何以牺牲他人信仰为代价的、对自身信仰的沙文主义显然是不可接受的，因为没有任何一种宗教掌握了关于上帝的全部真理。伊本·阿拉比发展了《古兰经》中体现的对其他宗教的积极态度，并将其推向了宽容的新高度：

This introspective, imaginative mysticism was a search for the ground of being in the depths of the self. It deprived the mystic of the certainties that characterize the more dogmatic forms of religion. Since each man and woman had had a unique experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery. There was no objective truth about God to which all must subscribe; since this God transcended the category of personality, predictions about his behavior and inclinations were impossible. Any consequent chauvinism about one’s own faith at the expense of other people’s was obviously unacceptable, since no one religion had the whole truth about God. Ibn al-Arabi developed the positive attitude toward other religions which could be found in the Koran and took it to a new extreme of tolerance:

这位神职人员在犹太会堂、寺庙、教堂和清真寺都同样自在，因为所有这些场所都提供了对上帝的有效理解。伊本·阿拉比经常使用“信仰所创造的上帝”（Khalq al-haqq fi'litiqad）这一短语；如果它指的是特定宗教中人们创造的、并被认为与上帝本身相同的“神”，那么它就带有贬义。这只会滋生不宽容和狂热。伊本·阿拉比没有提倡这种偶像崇拜，而是提出了这样的建议：

The man of God was equally at home in synagogue, temple, church and mosque, since all provided a valid apprehension of God. Ibn al-Arabi often used the phrase “the God created by the faiths” (Khalq al-haqq fi’litiqad); it could be pejorative if it referred to the “god” that men and women created in a particular religion and considered identical with God himself. This only bred intolerance and fanaticism. Instead of such idolatry, Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:

我们从未见过任何神，除了那启示于我们每个人身上并赋予具体存在的个人圣名；我们对个人主的理解必然会受到我们出生的宗教传统的影响。但神秘主义者（arif）明白，我们所信奉的这位“神”只不过是一位“天使”或神圣的特定象征，绝不能与隐秘的实在本身混淆。因此，他视所有不同的宗教为有效的神显。在那些教条主义宗教中，神将人类分裂成敌对阵营，而在神秘主义者中，神则是一种统一的力量。

We never see any god but the personal Name that has been revealed and given concrete existence in each one of us; inevitably our understanding of our personal Lord is colored by the religious tradition into which we were born. But the mystic (arif) knows that this “God” of ours is simply an “angel” or a particular symbol of the divine, which must never be confused with the Hidden Reality itself. Consequently he sees all the different religions as valid theophanies. Where the God of the more dogmatic religions divides humanity into warring camps, the God of the mystics is a unifying force.

伊本·阿拉比的教义对绝大多数穆斯林来说确实过于深奥，但它们也逐渐渗透到普通民众之中。在十二至十三世纪，苏菲主义不再是少数派运​​动，而是成为穆斯林帝国许多地区的主流伊斯兰思潮。正是在这一时期，各种苏菲教团或塔里卡（tariqa）相继建立，每个教团都有其独特的诠释。神秘信仰。苏菲派谢赫对民众影响巨大，他们常常被尊为圣人，其地位与什叶派伊玛目颇为相似。那是一个政治动荡的时期：巴格达哈里发政权摇摇欲坠，蒙古大军肆虐穆斯林城市。人们渴望一位比费拉苏夫派遥不可及的神和乌里玛教法严苛的神更加亲近、更富同情心的神。苏菲派的“迪克尔” （dhikr）修行——将神圣的名字作为咒语吟诵以达到狂喜——超越了苏菲教团的界限，传播开来。苏菲派的专注训练，以及其精心规定的呼吸和姿势技巧，帮助人们体验到内在的超然存在。并非人人都能达到更高的神秘境界，但这些灵修练习确实帮助人们摒弃了对神简单化和拟人化的观念，并将神体验为自身内在的存在。有些教团利用音乐和舞蹈来增强专注力，他们的领袖成为了人民的英雄。

It is true that Ibn al-Arabi’s teachings were too abstruse for the vast majority of Muslims, but they did percolate down to the more ordinary people. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in many parts of the Muslim empire. This was the period when the various Sufi orders or tariqas were founded, each with its particular interpretation of the mystical faith. The Sufi sheikh had a great influence on the populace and was often revered as a saint in rather the same way as the Shii Imams. It was a period of political upheaval: the Baghdad caliphate was disintegrating, and the Mongol hordes were devastating one Muslim city after another. People wanted a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the Faylasufs and the legalistic God of the ulema. The Sufi practices of dhikr, the recitation of the Divine Names as a mantra to induce ecstasy, spread beyond the tariqas. The Sufi disciplines of concentration, with their carefully prescribed techniques of breathing and posture, helped people to experience a sense of transcendent presence within. Not everybody was capable of the higher mystical states, but these spiritual exercises did help people to abandon simplistic and anthropomorphic notions of God and to experience him as a presence within the self. Some orders used music and dancing to enhance concentration, and their pirs became heroes to the people.

苏菲教团中最著名的当属毛拉维教团，其成员在西方被称为“旋转苦行僧”。他们庄严而高贵的舞蹈是一种冥想方法。随着苏菲不断旋转，他感到自我界限消融，融入舞蹈之中，预示着灵魂的消亡。该教团的创始人是贾拉勒丁·鲁米（约1207-1273年），他的弟子们尊称他为毛拉纳，意为“我们的导师”。他出生于中亚呼罗珊，但在蒙古军队入侵之前逃往今土耳其的科尼亚。他的神秘主义可以被视为穆斯林对这场灾难的回应，这场灾难或许曾导致许多人对真主（安拉）失去信仰。鲁米的思想与同时代的伊本·阿拉比相似，但他的诗作《玛斯纳维》 （Masnawi ，又称苏菲圣经）更受大众欢迎，帮助苏菲派的神灵在普通穆斯林中传播开来。1244年，鲁米被云游四方的苦行僧沙姆斯丁（Shams ad-Din）所吸引，视其为他那一代人的完美之人。事实上，沙姆斯丁自认为是先知的转世，并坚持别人称呼他为“穆罕默德”。他名声不佳，不遵守伊斯兰教法（沙里亚），自认为凌驾于这些琐事之上。鲁米的弟子们对老师如此明显的迷恋感到担忧，这也不难理解。沙姆斯丁在一次骚乱中丧生后，鲁米悲痛欲绝，更加投入到神秘音乐和舞蹈的创作中。他能够将自己的悲痛巧妙地转化为对上帝之爱的象征——上帝对人类的渴望以及人类对真主的向往。无论他是否意识到这一点不管怎样，每个人都在寻找缺席的神，隐约意识到自己与存在的源头分离了。

The most famous of the Sufi orders was the Mawlawiyyah, whose members are known in the West as the “whirling dervishes.” Their stately and dignified dance was a method of concentration. As he spun around and around, the Sufi felt the boundaries of selfhood dissolve as he melted into his dance, giving him a foretaste of the annihilation of Jana. The founder of the order was Jalal ad-Din Rumi (ca. 1207–73), known to his disciples as Mawlana, our Master. He had been born in Khurusan in Central Asia but had fled to Konya in modern Turkey before the advancing Mongol armies. His mysticism can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have caused many to lose faith in al-Lah. Rumi’s ideas are similar to those of his contemporary Ibn al-Arabi, but his poem the Masnawi, known as the Sufi Bible, had a more popular appeal and helped to disseminate the God of the mystics among ordinary Muslims who were not Sufis. In 1244 Rumi had come under the spell of the wandering dervish Shams ad-Din, whom he saw as the Perfect Man of his generation. Indeed, Shams ad-Din believed that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet and insisted upon being addressed as “Muhammad.” He had a dubious reputation and was known not to observe the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking himself above such trivialities. Rumi’s disciples were understandably worried by their Master’s evident infatuation. When Shams was killed in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical music and dancing. He was able to transform his grief imaginatively into a symbol of the love of God—of God’s yearning for humanity and humanity’s longing for al-Lah. Whether knowingly or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely aware that he or she was separated from the Source of being.

人们相信，完美之人能够激励更多普通人去寻求上帝：沙姆斯·丁从鲁米的《玛斯纳维》诗歌中领悟到了这种分离的痛苦。

The Perfect Man was believed to inspire more ordinary mortals to seek God: Shams ad-Din had unlocked in Rumi the poetry of the Masnawi, which recounted the agonies of this separation.

与其他苏菲派一样，鲁米将宇宙视为上帝无数尊名的显现。其中一些尊名揭示了上帝的愤怒或严厉，而另一些则表达了上帝与生俱来的慈悲。这位神秘主义者孜孜不倦地奋斗（圣战），力求在万物中辨别上帝的慈悲、爱与美，并摒弃一切其他表象。《玛斯纳维》挑战穆斯林去探寻人生的超越维度，透过表象看到内在的隐秘本质。正是自我蒙蔽了我们的双眼，使我们无法领悟万物内在的奥秘；但一旦我们超越了自我，我们便不再是孤立的个体，而是与万物存在的根源合而为一。鲁米再次强调，上帝只能是一种主观体验。他讲述了摩西与牧羊人的幽默故事，以此说明我们必须尊重他人对神圣的理解。有一天，摩西无意中听到一个牧羊人亲切地向上帝祷告：他想帮助上帝，无论上帝在哪里——洗衣服、捉虱子、在睡前亲吻他的手脚。“我只能说，想起您，就发出‘啊’和‘啊’的叹息。”祷告最后这样说道。摩西感到震惊。牧羊人究竟以为自己在和谁说话？天地万物的创造者吗？听起来就像是在和他的叔叔说话！牧羊人悔改了，垂头丧气地走进了旷野，但上帝责备了摩西。上帝不想要正统的言辞，而是炽热的爱和谦卑。谈论上帝没有所谓的正确方式：

Like other Sufis, Rumi saw the universe as a theophany of God’s myriad Names. Some of these revealed God’s wrath or severity, while others expressed those qualities of mercy which were intrinsic to the divine nature. The mystic was engaged in a ceaseless struggle (jihad) to distinguish the compassion, love and beauty of God in all things and to strip away everything else. The Masnawi challenged the Muslim to find the transcendent dimension in human life and to see through appearances to the hidden reality within. It is the ego which blinds us to the inner mystery of all things, but once we have got beyond that we are not isolated, separate beings but one with the Ground of all existence. Again, Rumi emphasized that God could only be a subjective experience. He tells the humorous tale of Moses and the Shepherd to illustrate the respect we must show to other people’s conceptions of the divine. One day Moses overheard a shepherd talking familiarly to God: he wanted to help God, wherever he was—to wash his clothes, pick the lice off, kiss his hands and feet at bedtime. “All I can say, remembering You,” the prayer concluded, “is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhh.” Moses was horrified. Who on earth did the shepherd imagine he was talking to? The Creator of heaven and earth? It sounded as though he were talking to his uncle! The shepherd repented and wandered disconsolately off into the desert, but God rebuked Moses. He did not want orthodox words but burning love and humility. There were no correct ways of talking about God:

任何关于上帝的言论都像牧羊人的言论一样荒谬，但当一个信徒透过面纱看到事物的真相时，他会发现这与他所有的人类先入之见都截然相反。

Any speech about God was as absurd as the shepherd’s, but when a believer looked through the veils to how things really were, he would find that it belied all his human preconceptions.

此时，悲剧也促使欧洲犹太人形成了新的上帝观念。西方的反犹主义浪潮令犹太社群的生活苦不堪言，许多人渴望一位比“宝座神秘主义者”所体验到的遥远神祇更加亲近、更加人性化的上帝。九世纪时，卡洛尼莫斯家族从意大利南部迁徙到德国，并带来了一些神秘主义文献。但到了十二世纪，迫害给阿什肯纳兹犹太人的虔诚信仰带来了新的悲观情绪，这体现在卡洛尼莫斯家族三位成员的著作中：拉比塞缪尔·埃德（老塞缪尔），他于约1150年撰写了短篇论著《敬畏上帝之书》（Sefer ha-Yirah ）；虔敬派拉比犹大（Rabbi Judah the Pietist），《虔敬派之书》（ Sefer Hasidim ）的作者，以及他的堂兄沃尔姆斯的拉比埃利泽·本·犹大（Rabbi Eliezar ben Judah of Worms，卒于1230年），后者编辑了许多论著和神秘主义文本。他们并非哲学家或系统思想家，他们的作品表明，他们的思想借鉴自许多看似不相容的来源。他们深受费拉苏夫（Faylasuf）的枯燥著作的影响。萨迪亚·伊本·约瑟夫的著作已被翻译成希伯来语，此外，像阿西西的弗朗西斯这样的基督教神秘主义者也对其有所影响。他们从这些奇特的来源中融合，创造出一种灵性，这种灵性在17世纪之前一直对法国和德国的犹太人至关重要。

By this time tragedy had also helped the Jews of Europe to form a new conception of God. The crusading anti-Semitism of the West was making life intolerable for the Jewish communities, and many wanted a more immediate, personal God than the remote deity experienced by the Throne Mystics. During the ninth century, the Kalonymos family had emigrated from southern Italy to Germany and had brought some mystical literature with them. But by the twelfth century, persecution had introduced a new pessimism into Ashkenazic piety, and this was expressed in the writings of three members of the Kalonymos clan: Rabbi Samuel the Elder, who wrote the short treatise Sefer ha-Yirah (The Book of the Fear of God) in about 1150; Rabbi Judah the Pietist, author of Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pietists), and his cousin Rabbi Eliezar ben Judah of Worms (d. 1230), who edited a number of treatises and mystical texts. They were not philosophers or systematic thinkers, and their work shows that they had borrowed their ideas from a number of sources that might seem incompatible. They had been greatly impressed by the dry Faylasuf Saadia ibn Joseph, whose books had been translated into Hebrew, and by such Christian mystics as Francis of Assisi. From this strange amalgam of sources, they managed to create a spirituality which remained important to the Jews of France and Germany until the seventeenth century.

人们或许还记得，拉比们曾宣称，拒绝上帝创造的快乐是一种罪过。但德国虔敬派所宣扬的弃绝，却类似于基督教的苦行主义。犹太人只有摒弃享乐，放弃诸如饲养宠物或与孩子玩耍之类的消遣，才能在来世见到神圣的舍金纳（Shekinah）。犹太人应当培养一种如同上帝一般的冷漠（apatheia），对蔑视和侮辱毫不在意。然而，人们可以称上帝为“朋友”。任何一位“宝座神秘主义者”都不会像以利以谢那样，称上帝为“汝”（Thou）。这种亲切的称呼悄然融入了礼拜仪式，描绘出一个既是内在的、与人亲密同在的上帝，同时又是超越的上帝。

The Rabbis, it will be recalled, had declared it sinful to deny oneself pleasure created by God. But the German Pietists preached a renunciation that resembled Christian asceticism. A Jew would only see the Shekinah in the next world if he turned his back on pleasure and gave up such pastimes as keeping pets or playing with children. Jews should cultivate an apatheia like God’s, remaining impervious to scorn and insults. But God could be addressed as Friend. No Throne Mystic would have dreamt of calling God “Thou,” as Eliezar did. This familiarity crept into the liturgy, depicting a God who was immanent and intimately present at the same time as he was transcendent:

他们通过指出无人能亲近上帝本身，唯有上帝才能以“荣耀”（kavod）或“被称为舍金纳（Shekinah）的伟大光辉”向世人显现。虔敬派并不为这种表面上的矛盾而担忧。他们专注于实际问题而非神学上的细枝末节，教导犹太同胞专注（kawwanah）的方法和手势，以增强他们对上帝临在的感知。静默至关重要；虔敬派信徒应紧闭双眼，用祈祷披肩遮住头部以避免分心，收腹并磨牙。他们设计了特殊的“延长祈祷”的方法，这种方法被认为有助于增强对上帝临在的感知。虔敬派信徒不应只是简单地重复礼拜仪式的词句，而应数出每个单词的字母，计算其数值，超越语言的字面意义。他必须将注意力向上集中，以增强对更高层次现实的感知。

They qualified this immanence by showing that nobody could approach God himself but only God as he manifested himself to mankind in his “glory” (kavod) or in “the great radiance called Shekinah.” The Pietists were not worried by the apparent inconsistency. They concentrated on practical matters rather than theological niceties, teaching their fellow Jews methods of concentration (kawwanah) and gestures that would enhance their sense of God’s presence. Silence was essential; a Pietist should close his eyes tightly, cover his head with a prayer shawl to avoid distraction, pull in his stomach and grind his teeth. They devised special ways of “drawing out prayer,” which was found to encourage this sense of Presence. Instead of simply repeating the words of the liturgy, the Pietist should count the letters of each word, calculating their numerical value and getting beyond the literal meaning of the language. He must direct his attention upward, to encourage his sense of a higher reality.

在伊斯兰帝国，犹太人的处境要好得多，那里没有反犹迫害，他们也不需要这种阿什肯纳兹式的虔诚。然而，为了应对穆斯林的发展，他们正在演变出一种新的犹太教形式。正如犹太教的费拉苏夫派试图从哲学角度解释《圣经》中的上帝一样，其他犹太人也尝试这样做。他们试图赋予他们的神一种神秘的、象征性的诠释。起初，这些神秘主义者只占极少数。他们的修行是一门秘传的学科，由师徒相传：他们称之为卡巴拉，或“传承的传统”。然而，最终，卡巴拉的神吸引了大多数人，并以一种哲学家们的神从未做到的方式，占据了犹太人的想象。哲学有可能将神变成一个遥远的抽象概念，但神秘主义者的神却能够触及那些超越理性的深层恐惧和焦虑。如果说宝座神秘主义者满足于从外部凝视神的荣耀，那么卡巴拉主义者则试图深入探究神的内在生命和人类的意识。卡巴拉主义者没有理性地推测神的本质以及他与世界关系的形而上学问题，而是转向了想象。

The situation of the Jews in the Islamic empire, where there was no anti-Semitic persecution, was far happier, and they had no need of this Ashkenazic pietism. They were evolving a new type of Judaism, however, as a response to Muslim developments. Just as the Jewish Faylasufs had attempted to explain the God of the Bible philosophically, other Jews tried to give their God a mystical, symbolic interpretation. At first these mystics constituted only a tiny minority. Theirs was an esoteric discipline, handed on from master to disciple: they called it Kabbalah, or “inherited tradition.” Eventually, however, the God of Kabbalah would appeal to the majority and take hold of the Jewish imagination in a way that the God of the Philosophers never did. Philosophy threatened to turn God into a remote abstraction, but the God of the Mystics was able to touch those fears and anxieties that lie deeper than the rational. Where the Throne Mystics had been content to gaze upon the glory of God from without, the Kabbalists attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and the human consciousness. Instead of speculating rationally about the nature of God and the metaphysical problems of his relationship with the world, the Kabbalists turned to the imagination.

与苏菲派一样，卡巴拉学者也运用了诺斯替主义和新柏拉图主义中关于上帝本质与我们在启示和创造中瞥见的上帝之间的区分。上帝本身本质上是不可知的、不可思议的、非人格化的。他们称这位隐秘的上帝为“恩索夫”（En Sof，字面意思是“无尽”）。我们对恩索夫一无所知：他甚至在《圣经》或《塔木德》中都没有被提及。一位十三世纪的匿名作者写道，恩索夫不可能成为人类启示的对象。⁵⁴与耶和华不同，恩索夫没有被记载的名字；“他”并非指人。事实上，用“它”来指代神性更为准确。这与《圣经》和《塔木德》中高度人格化的上帝截然不同。卡巴拉学者发展出自己的神话体系，以帮助他们探索宗教意识的新领域。为了解释恩索夫（En Sof）与耶和华（YHWH）之间的关系，同时又不屈从于诺斯替教关于二者是两个不同存在的异端邪说，卡巴拉学者发展出一种象征性的经文解读方法。如同苏菲派一样，他们设想了一个过程，在这个过程中，隐秘的神向人类显现自身。恩索夫以十个不同的面向或十个质点（sefiroth，意为“数字”）的形式向犹太神秘主义者显现，这些质点代表着源自不可知的神性深渊的神圣实在。每个质点都代表着恩索夫启示展开过程中的一个阶段，并拥有其自身的象征性名称，但每一个神圣领域都包含了在特定主题下对神性奥秘的全面阐释。卡巴拉的诠释方法使得圣经中的每一个字都指向十个质点中的一个或几个：每一节经文描述的事件或现象都与神自身的内在生命有着对应的体现。

Like the Sufis, the Kabbalists made use of the Gnostic and Neoplatonic distinction between the essence of God and the God whom we glimpse in revelation and creation. God himself is essentially unknowable, inconceivable and impersonal. They called the hidden God En Sof, (literally, “without end”). We know nothing whatever about En Sof: he is not even mentioned in either the Bible or the Talmud. An anonymous thirteenth-century author wrote that En Sof is incapable of becoming the subject of a revelation to humanity.⁵⁴ Unlike YHWH, En Sof had no documented name; “he” is not a person. Indeed it is more accurate to refer to the Godhead as “It.” This was a radical departure from the highly personal God of the Bible and the Talmud. The Kabbalists evolved their own mythology to help them to explore a new realm of the religious consciousness. To explain the relationship between En Sof and YHWH, without yielding to the Gnostic heresy that they were two different beings, the Kabbalists developed a symbolic method of reading scripture. Like the Sufis, they imagined a process whereby the hidden God made himself known to humanity. En Sof had manifested himself to the Jewish mystics under ten different aspects or sefiroth (“numerations”) of the divine reality which had emanated from the inscrutable depths of the unknowable Godhead. Each sefirah represented a stage in En Sof’s unfolding revelation and had its own symbolic name, but each of these divine spheres contained the whole mystery of God considered under a particular heading. The Kabbalistic exegesis made every single word of the Bible refer to one or other of the ten sefiroth: each verse described an event or phenomenon that had its counterpart in the inner life of God himself.

伊本·阿拉比将上帝慈悲的叹息——祂将自己启示给人类——视为创造世界的圣言。同样，十个质点（Sefiroth）既是上帝赐予自己的名字，也是他创造世界的方式。这十个名字共同构成了他唯一的伟大名字，而这个名字不为人知。它们代表了至高者（En Sof）从他孤独而不可接近的状态降临到尘世的各个阶段。它们通常被列如下：

Ibn al-Arabi had seen God’s sigh of compassion, which had revealed him to mankind, as the Word which had created the world. In rather the same way, the sefiroth were both the names that God had given to himself and the means whereby he had created the world. Together these ten names formed his one great Name, which was not known to men. They represented the stages whereby En Sof had descended from his lonely inaccessibility to the mundane world. They are usually listed as follows:

1. Kether Elyon：“至高王冠”。
2. Kether Elyon: the “Supreme Crown.”
3. Hokhmah：“智慧。”
4. Hokhmah: “Wisdom.”
5. 比纳：“情报。”
6. Binah: “Intelligence.”
7. Hesed：意为“爱”或“怜悯”。
8. Hesed: “Love” or “Mercy.”
9. Din：“权力”（通常表现为严厉的审判）。
10. Din: “Power” (usually manifested in stern judgment).
11. Rakhamim：“怜悯”；有时也被称为“Tifereth”：“美丽”。
12. Rakhamim: “Compassion”; sometimes called “Tifereth”: “Beauty.”
13. Netsakh：“持久的耐力。”
14. Netsakh: “Lasting Endurance.”
15. 霍德：“陛下。”
16. Hod: “Majesty.”
17. Yesod：“基础。”
18. Yesod: “Foundation.”
19. Malkuth：“王国”；也称为“舍金娜”。
20. Malkuth: “Kingdom”; also called “Shekinah.”

有时，质点（Sefiroth）被描绘成一棵树，倒立生长，根植于深不可测的恩索夫（En Sof）[见图]，树梢则位于舍金纳（Shekinah），即世界之中。这种有机的意象表达了卡巴拉符号的统一性。恩索夫是流淌于树枝间的汁液，赋予它们生命，并将它们统一于一个神秘而复杂的现实之中。尽管恩索夫与祂的圣名世界有所区别，但二者却如同煤炭与火焰一般，密不可分。质点代表着光明世界，它们显现出恩索夫的黑暗，而恩索夫则始终处于不可穿透的晦暗之中。这再次表明，我们对“神”的理解无法完全表达它们所指向的现实。

Sometimes the sefiroth are depicted as a tree, growing upside down with its roots in the incomprehensible depths of En Sof [see diagram] and its summit in the Shekinah, in the world. The organic image expresses the unity of this Kabbalistic symbol. En Sof is the sap that runs through the branches of the tree and gives them life, unifying them in a mysterious and complex reality. Although there is a distinction between En Sof and the world of his names, the two are one in rather the same way as a coal and a flame. The sefiroth represent the worlds of light that manifest the darkness of En Sof, which remains in impenetrable obscurity. It is yet another way of showing that our notions of “God” cannot fully express the reality to which they point.

然而，质点（Sefiroth）的世界并非神性与世界之间“外在”的另一种现实。它们并非连接天地的阶梯，而是感官所体验的世界的基础。因为神是万物之源，所以质点存在于万物之中，并发挥着作用。它们也代表着人类意识的各个阶段，神秘主义者通过深入自身心灵，最终升华至神。再次强调，神与人密不可分。一些卡巴拉学者将质点视为神最初赋予人类的原始肢体。这正是《圣经》所说的“人是按神的形象创造的”的含义：尘世的现实与神创造的原始人相对应。通往天界原型现实的道路。上帝以树或人的形象出现，是对一种无法用理性表达的现实的想象性描绘。卡巴拉学者并非敌视哲学——他们中的许多人敬仰萨迪亚·高恩和迈蒙尼德等人物——但他们发现，就探寻上帝的奥秘而言，象征主义和神话比形而上学更令人满意。

The world of the sefiroth is not an alternative reality “out there” between the Godhead and the world, however. They are not the rungs of a ladder between heaven and earth but underlie the world experienced by the senses. Because God is all in all, the sefiroth are present and active in everything that exists. They also represent the stages of human consciousness by which the mystic ascends to God by descending into his own mind. Yet again, God and man are depicted as inseparable. Some Kabbalists saw the sefiroth as the limbs of primordial man as originally intended by God. This was what the Bible had meant when it said that man had been created in God’s image: the mundane reality here below corresponded to an archetypal reality in the heavenly world. The images of God as a tree or as a man were imaginative depictions of a reality that defied rational formulation. The Kabbalists were not antagonistic toward Falsafah—many of them revered figures like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides—but they found symbolism and mythology more satisfying than metaphysics for penetrating the mystery of God.

塞菲罗斯之树

The Tree of the Sefiroth

最具影响力的卡巴拉经典是《佐哈尔》，它很可能是西班牙神秘主义者莱昂的摩西于公元1275年左右写成的。年轻时，他曾研习迈蒙尼德的著作，但逐渐被神秘主义和卡巴拉的秘传传统所吸引。《佐哈尔》（又名《光辉之书》）是一部神秘主义小说，描绘了三世纪的塔木德学者西蒙·本·约海带着儿子以利以谢在巴勒斯坦游历，与门徒们探讨上帝、自然和人生。这部作品没有清晰的结构，也没有系统性的主题或思想发展。这种结构与《佐哈尔》的精神格格不入，因为书中的上帝拒绝任何固定的思维体系。与伊本·阿拉比一样，莱昂的摩西也相信上帝会给予每位神秘主义者独特而个人的启示，因此对《托拉》的解读方式没有限制：随着卡巴拉学者的深入，层层叠叠的意义也随之显现。《佐哈尔》揭示了十个质点（sefiroth）的神秘显现过程，在这个过程中，非人格化的“恩索夫”（En Sof）逐渐成为人格化的个体。在最高的三个质点——王冠（Kether）、智慧（Hokhmah）和理解（Binah）——中，仿佛“恩索夫”刚刚“决定”表达自身，神圣的实在被称为“他”。随着“他”下降到中间的质点——慈悲（Hesed）、秩序（Din）、智慧（Tifereth）、真理（Netsakh）、荣耀（Hod）和基础（Yesod）——“他”变成了“你”。最终，当上帝在舍金纳（Shekinah）显现于世间时，“他”称自己为“我”。正是在这一点上，上帝仿佛成为个体，其自我表达圆满完成，人类才能开启神秘之旅。一旦神秘主义者理解了自身最深层的自我，他便能觉察到内在的上帝临在，进而提升到更为非人格化的更高境界，超越人格和自我中心的局限。这是回归我们存在那难以想象的源头，回归那未被创造的隐秘现实世界。在这种神秘的视角下，我们感官所感知的世界仅仅是神圣现实的最后一层、最外层的外壳。

The most influential Kabbalistic text was The Zohar, which was probably written in about 1275 by the Spanish mystic Moses of Leon. As a young man, he had studied Maimonides but had gradually felt the attraction of mysticism and the esoteric tradition of Kabbalah. The Zohar (The Book of Splendour) is a sort of mystical novel, which depicts the third-century Talmudist Simeon ben Yohai wandering around Palestine with his son Eliezar, talking to his disciples about God, nature and human life. There is no clear structure and no systematic development of theme or ideas. Such an approach would be alien to the spirit of The Zohar, whose God resists any neat system of thought. Like Ibn al-Arabi, Moses of Leon believed that God gives each mystic a unique and personal revelation, so there is no limit to the way the Torah can be interpreted: as the Kabbalist progresses, layer upon layer of significance is revealed. The Zohar shows the mysterious emanation of the ten sefiroth as a process whereby the impersonal En Sof becomes a personality. In the three highest sefiroth—Kether, Hokhmah and Binah—when, as it were, En Sof has only just “decided” to express himself, the divine reality is called “he.” As “he” descends through the middle sefiroth—Hesed, Din, Tifereth, Netsakh, Hod and Yesod—“he” becomes “you.” Finally, when God becomes present in the world in the Shekinah, “he” calls himself “I.” It is at this point, where God has, as it were, become an individual and his self-expression is complete, that man can begin his mystical journey. Once the mystic has acquired an understanding of his own deepest self, he becomes aware of the Presence of God within him and can then ascend to the more impersonal higher spheres, transcending the limits of personality and egotism. It is a return to the unimaginable Source of our being and the hidden world of uncreated reality. In this mystical perspective, our world of sense impression is simply the last and outermost shell of the divine reality.

在卡巴拉和苏菲主义中，创世教义实际上并非关注宇宙的物质起源。《佐哈尔》将《创世记》的记载视为“无限之光”（En Sof）内部危机的象征性版本，这场危机促使神性突破其深不可测的内省状态，显现自身。正如《佐哈尔》所说：

In Kabbalah, as in Sufism, the doctrine of the creation is not really concerned with the physical origins of the universe. The Zohar sees the Genesis account as a symbolic version of a crisis within En Sof, which causes the Godhead to break out of its unfathomable introspection and reveal itself. As The Zohar says:

在《创世记》中，上帝的第一个创造之言是：“要有光！”在《佐哈尔》对《创世记》的注释（希伯来语称作“Bereshit”，取自其开篇词“起初”）中，这“黑暗的火焰”是第一个质点：至高王冠（Kether Elyon）。它没有颜色，也没有形状：其他卡巴拉学者更倾向于称之为虚无（ayin）。人类心智所能理解的最高神性形式被等同于虚无，因为它与世间万物都无法相提并论。因此，所有其他质点都源于虚无的子宫。这是对传统“无中生有”（ex nihilo）创造教义的一种神秘诠释。神性的自我表达过程如同光明的涌现，不断向更广阔的领域扩散。《佐哈尔》继续写道：

In Genesis, God’s first creative word had been: “Let there be light!” In The Zohar’s commentary on Genesis (called Bereshit in Hebrew after its opening word: “in the beginning”) this “dark flame” is the first sefirah: Kether Elyon, the Supreme Crown of Divinity. It has no color or form: other Kabbalists prefer to call it Nothing (ayin). The highest form of divinity that the human mind can conceive is equated with nothingness because it bears no comparison with any of the other things in existence. All the other sefiroth, therefore, emerge from the womb of Nothingness. This is a mystical interpretation of the traditional doctrine of the creation ex nihilo. The process of the Godhead’s self-expression continues as the welling of light, which spreads in ever wider spheres. The Zohar continues:

这个“点”是智慧（Hokhmah），第二个质点，它包含了所有被造物的理想形态。这个点发展成一座宫殿或建筑，成为智慧（Binah），第三个质点。这三个最高的质点代表了人类理解的极限。卡巴拉学者认为，上帝存在于智慧之中，祂是伟大的“谁？”（Mi），祂存在于每一个问题的开端。但我们无法得到答案。即使无限之光（En Sof）逐渐适应人类的局限，我们仍然无法知晓祂“是谁”：我们上升得越高，“祂”就越笼罩在黑暗和神秘之中。

This “point” is Hokhmah (Wisdom), the second sefirah which contains the ideal form of all created things. The point develops into a palace or a building, which becomes Binah (Intelligence), the third sefirah. These three highest sefiroth represent the limit of human comprehension. Kabbalists say that God exists in Binah as the great “Who?” (Mi) which stands at the beginning of every question. But it is not possible to get an answer. Even though En Sof is gradually adapting Itself to human limitations, we have no way of knowing “Who” he is: the higher we ascend, the more “he” remains shrouded in darkness and mystery.

接下来的七个质点据说对应于《创世记》中的七天创造。在圣经时期，耶和华最终战胜了迦南的古代女神及其情色崇拜。但随着卡巴拉学者努力阐释上帝的奥秘，古老的神话以伪装的形式重新出现。《佐哈尔》将比娜（Binah）描述为至高之母，她的子宫被“黑暗之火”穿透，孕育出七个较低的质点（sefiroth）。第九质点耶索德（Yesod ）再次引发了关于阳具的联想：它被描绘成神圣生命通过神秘的生育行为流入宇宙的通道。然而，在第十质点舍金娜（Shekinah）中，创世和神谱的古老性象征意义展现得最为清晰。在《塔木德》中，舍金娜是一个中性形象：它既无性别也无性。然而，在卡巴拉中，舍金娜成为了上帝的女性面向。 《巴希尔》（约公元1200年）是最早的卡巴拉文本之一，它将舍金娜（Shekinah）等同于诺斯替教中的索菲亚（Sophia）——最后一位从普勒罗玛（Pleroma）堕落的神圣化身，如今迷失方向，与神性疏离，在世间游荡。《佐哈尔》将舍金娜的“流放”与《创世记》中记载的亚当堕落联系起来。它指出，亚当在生命树中看到了“中间的七个质点”（sefiroth） ，在知识树中看到了舍金娜。他没有同时敬拜七个质点，而是选择单独崇拜舍金娜，将生命与知识割裂开来，破坏了质点的统一性。神圣的生命无法再源源不断地流入世界，世界也与神圣的源头隔绝了。但通过遵守律法（Torah），以色列社群可以治愈舍金娜的流放，使世界重新与神性合一。不出所料，许多严谨的塔木德学者对此深恶痛绝，但舍金娜的流放——这与古代神话中女神远离神圣世界的故事遥相呼应——却成为了卡巴拉中最受欢迎的元素之一。女性舍金娜为原本过于偏重男性特质的上帝概念带来了某种性别平衡，显然满足了重要的宗教需求。

The next seven sefiroth are said to correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis. During the biblical period, YHWH had eventually triumphed over the ancient goddesses of Canaan and their erotic cults. But as Kabbalists struggled to express the mystery of God, the old mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form. The Zohar describes Binah as the Supernal Mother, whose womb is penetrated by the “dark flame” to give birth to the seven lower sefiroth. Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah, inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as the channel through which the divine life pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation. It is in the Shekinah, the tenth sefirah, however, that the ancient sexual symbolism of creation and theogony appears most clearly. In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it had neither sex nor gender. In Kabbalah, however, the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God. The Bahir (ca. 1200), one of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, had identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered, lost and alienated from the Godhead, through the world. The Zohar links this “exile of the Shekinah” with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis. It says that Adam was shown the “middle sefiroth” in the Tree of Life and the Shekinah in the Tree of Knowledge. Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth together, he chose to venerate the Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth. The divine life could no longer flow uninterruptedly into the world, which was isolated from its divine Source. But by observing the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah and reunite the world to the Godhead. Not surprisingly, many strict Talmudists found this an abhorrent idea, but the exile of the Shekinah, which echoed the ancient myths of the goddess who wandered far from the divine world, became one of the most popular elements of Kabbalah. The female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God, which tended to be too heavily weighted toward the masculine, and it clearly fulfilled an important religious need.

神圣流放的概念也触及了那种分离感，而这种分离感正是人类诸多焦虑的根源。《佐哈尔》不断地将邪恶定义为某种分离的事物，或是进入了某种不适宜的关系的事物。伦理一神论的问题之一在于它将邪恶孤立出来。因为我们无法接受上帝身上存在邪恶，所以我们有可能无法忍受自身内部的邪恶。于是，邪恶会被排斥，并被妖魔化、非人化。西方基督教中撒旦的恐怖形象正是这种扭曲的投射。《佐哈尔》认为邪恶的根源在于上帝自身：在于第五个质点——严厉的审判（Din ）。严厉的审判被描绘成上帝的左手，慈悲（Hesed）则是他的右手。只要严厉的审判和谐运作，一切便皆可安宁。凭借神圣的慈悲，它是积极有益的。但如果它脱离并与其他质点（sefiroth）分离，它就会变得邪恶且具有破坏性。《佐哈尔》并未告诉我们这种分离是如何发生的。在下一章中，我们将看到后来的卡巴拉学者反思了邪恶的问题，他们认为邪恶是上帝自我启示早期阶段发生的某种原始“意外”的结果。如果按字面意思解释卡巴拉，它几乎毫无意义，但它的神话体系却能给人带来心理上的慰藉。当灾难和悲剧在十五世纪席卷西班牙犹太人时，正是卡巴拉的上帝帮助他们理解了苦难的意义。

The notion of the divine exile also addressed that sense of separation which is the cause of so much human anxiety. The Zohar constantly defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it is unsuited. One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection. The Zohar finds the root of evil in God himself: in Din or Stern Judgment, the fifth sefirah. Din is depicted as God’s left hand, Hesed (Mercy) as his right. As long as Din operates harmoniously with the divine Mercy, it is positive and beneficial. But if it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sefiroth, it becomes evil and destructive. The Zohar does not tell us how this separation came about. In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil, which they saw as the result of a kind of primordial “accident” that occurred in the very early stages of God’s self-revelation. Kabbalah makes little sense if interpreted literally, but its mythology proved psychologically satisfying. When disaster and tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century, it was the Kabbalistic God which helped them to make sense of their suffering.

我们可以在西班牙神秘主义者亚伯拉罕·阿布拉菲亚（1240年—1291年后）的作品中看到卡巴拉的心理学洞察力。他的大部分著作与《佐哈尔》的创作时期大致相同，但阿布拉菲亚关注的是如何通过实践方法获得对神的感知，而非神本身的本质。这些方法与当今精神分析学家在世俗的启迪之旅中所采用的方法类似。正如苏菲派渴望像穆罕默德那样体验神一样，阿布拉菲亚声称自己找到了获得先知启示的方法。他发展出一种犹太式的瑜伽，运用呼吸、念诵真言和采用特殊姿势等常见的专注训练方法来达到另一种意识状态。阿布拉菲亚是一位非同寻常的卡巴拉学者。他博学多才，在31岁时经历了一次震撼人心的宗教体验后皈依神秘主义，此前他已研习过《托拉》、《塔木德》和《法尔萨法》。他似乎相信自己是弥赛亚，不仅对犹太人，对基督徒也是如此。因此，他广泛游历西班牙各地，广传福音，甚至远赴近东。1280年，他以犹太使节的身份觐见了教皇。尽管阿布拉菲亚经常直言不讳地批评基督教，但他似乎也欣赏卡巴拉的上帝与三位一体神学之间的相似之处。最高的三个质点（sefiroth）让人联想到道（Logos）和灵（Spirit）、理智（Intellect）和智慧（Wisdom），它们都源于圣父，即那隐匿于不可接近之光中的虚无。阿布拉菲亚本人也喜欢用三位一体的方式来谈论上帝。

We can see the psychological acuity of Kabbalah in the work of the Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia (1240–after 1291). The bulk of his work was composed at about the same time as The Zohar, but Abulafia concentrated on the practical method of achieving a sense of God rather than with the nature of God itself. These methods are similar to those employed today by psychoanalysts in their secular quest for enlightenment. As the Sufis had wanted to experience God like Muhammad, Abulafia claimed to have found a way of achieving prophetic inspiration. He evolved a Jewish form of Yoga, using the usual disciplines of concentration such as breathing, the recitation of a mantra and the adoption of a special posture to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Abulafia was an unusual Kabbalist. He was a highly erudite man, who had studied Torah, Talmud and Falsafah before being converted to mysticism by an overwhelming religious experience at the age of thirty-one. He seems to have believed that he was the Messiah, not only to Jews but also to Christians. Accordingly, he traveled extensively throughout Spain making disciples and even ventured as far as the Near East. In 1280 he visited the Pope as a Jewish ambassador. Although Abulafia was often very outspoken in his criticism of Christianity, he seems to have appreciated the similarity between the Kabbalistic God and the theology of the Trinity. The three highest sefiroth are reminiscent of the Logos and Spirit, the Intellect and Wisdom of God, which proceed from the Father, the Nothingness lost in inaccessible light. Abulafia himself liked to speak about God in a Trinitarian manner.

阿布拉菲亚教导说，要找到这位神，就必须“解开灵魂的封印，解开束缚它的结”。“解开结”这一说法也出现在藏传佛教中，这再次表明了世界各地神秘主义者的基本共识。所描述的过程或许可以比作精神分析试图解开那些阻碍患者心理健康的情结。作为一名卡巴拉学者，阿布拉菲亚……他更关注赋予整个宇宙生机却无法被灵魂感知的神圣能量。只要我们的头脑被基于感官知觉的观念所束缚，就很难辨别生命的超越性元素。阿布拉菲亚通过瑜伽修行，教导弟子超越寻常意识，去发现一个全新的世界。他的方法之一是“字母组合之学”（ Hokhmah ha-Tseruf），其形式是对上帝之名的冥想。卡巴拉学者要将神圣之名的字母以不同的组合方式排列，以此将思维从具象层面解放出来，进入一种更为抽象的感知模式。这种修行方法——在外人看来似乎毫无吸引力——其效果却令人惊叹。阿布拉菲亚本人将其比作聆听音乐和声，字母表的字母如同音阶中的音符。他还运用了一种联想方法，他称之为“dillug”（跳跃）和“kefitsah”（跳步），这显然与现代分析方法中的自由联想非常相似。据说，这种方法也取得了惊人的成果。正如阿布拉菲亚所解释的，它揭示了隐藏的心理过程，并将卡巴拉学者从“自然领域的牢笼”中解放出来，引领他们走向神圣领域的边界。 ⁵⁷如此一来，灵魂的“封印”便被打开，入门者发现了能够启迪心灵、抚慰心灵痛苦的灵性力量。

To find this God, Abulafia taught that it was necessary “to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it.” The phrase “untying the knots” is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide. The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokhmah ha-Tseruf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters), which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine Name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline—which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider—appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and kefitsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modern analytic practice of free association. Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from “the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere.”⁵⁷ In this way, the “seals” of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart.

就像精神分析患者需要治疗师的指导一样，阿布拉菲亚坚持认为，神秘的心灵之旅只能在卡巴拉大师的指导下进行。他深知其中的危险，因为他年轻时曾经历过一次毁灭性的宗教体验，几乎让他陷入绝望。如今，患者常常会将分析师的形象内化，以获取他或她所代表的力量和健康。同样，阿布拉菲亚写道，卡巴拉学者常常会“看到”和“听到”他的灵性导师，后者成为“内在的推动者，打开他内心紧闭的大门”。他感受到一股新的力量涌动和内在的转变，这种转变如此强烈，仿佛来自神圣的源泉。阿布拉菲亚的一位弟子对这种狂喜状态给出了另一种解释：他说，神秘主义者成为了他自己的弥赛亚。在狂喜中，他看到了自己获得解放和启迪的自我景象：

In rather the same way as a psychoanalytic patient needs the guidance of his therapist, Abulafia insisted that the mystical journey into the mind could only be undertaken under the supervision of a master of Kabbalah. He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair. Today patients will often internalize the person of the analyst in order to appropriate the strength and health that he or she represents. Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often “see” and “hear” the person of his spiritual director, who became “the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him.” He felt a new surge of power and an inner transformation that was so overwhelming that it seemed to issue from a divine source. A disciple of Abulafia gave another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah. In ecstasy he was confronted with a vision of his own liberated and enlightened self:

犹太神秘主义者历来不愿宣称与神合一。阿布拉菲亚及其门徒只会说，卡巴拉学者通过与灵性导师的结合或实现个人解脱，间接地受到了神的触动。中世纪神秘主义与现代心理疗法之间存在着明显的差异，但两者都发展出了类似的技巧来实现疗愈和个人整合。

Jewish mystics were always reluctant to claim union with God. Abulafia and his disciples would only say that by experiencing union with a spiritual director or by realizing a personal liberation the Kabbalist had been touched by God indirectly. There are obvious differences between medieval mysticism and modern psychotherapy, but both disciplines have evolved similar techniques to achieve healing and personal integration.

在西方，基督教神秘主义传统的兴起较为缓慢。他们落后于拜占庭帝国和伊斯兰帝国的基督教一神论者，或许尚未做好迎接这一新发展的准备。然而，在十四世纪，神秘主义宗教蓬勃发展，尤其是在北欧。德国尤其涌现出一批神秘主义者：埃克哈特大师（1260–？1327）、约翰内斯·陶勒（1300–1361）、格特鲁德大帝（1256–1302）和亨利·苏索（约1295–1306）。英国也对西方的发展做出了重大贡献，涌现出四位伟大的神秘主义者，他们迅速在欧洲大陆和英国本土都吸引了众多追随者：汉波尔的理查德·罗尔（1290-1349）、《未知之云》的作者（姓名不详）、沃尔特·希尔顿（卒于1346年）以及诺里奇的朱利安夫人（约1342-1416）。这些神秘主义者的修行程度不一。例如，理查德·罗尔似乎沉迷于对异域感官体验的追求，他的灵修有时也带有某种自负的色彩。但他们中最杰出的几位，却从自身领悟到了许多希腊人、苏菲派和卡巴拉学者早已获得的真知灼见。

In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition. They had fallen behind the monotheists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires and were perhaps not ready for this new development. During the fourteenth century, however, there was a veritable explosion of mystical religion, especially in Northern Europe. Germany in particular produced a flock of mystics: Meister Eckhart (1260–? 1327), Johannes Tauler (1300–61), Gertrude the Great (1256–1302) and Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1306). England also made a significant contribution to this Western development and produced four great mystics who quickly attracted a following on the Continent as well as in their own country: Richard Rolle of Hampole (1290–1349), the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton (d. 1346) and Dame Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1416). Some of these mystics were more advanced than others. Richard Rolle, for example, seems to have gotten trapped in the cultivation of exotic sensations, and his spirituality was sometimes characterized by a certain egotism. But the greatest of them discovered for themselves many of the insights already achieved by the Greeks, Sufis and Kabbalists.

例如，对陶勒和苏索影响深远的埃克哈特大师，其本人也深受德尼·阿雷奥帕吉特和迈蒙尼德的影响。作为一名多明我会修士，他才华横溢，曾在巴黎大学讲授亚里士多德哲学。然而，1325年，他的神秘主义教义使他与科隆大主教发生冲突，后者以异端罪名起诉他：他被指控否认上帝的良善，声称上帝本身诞生于灵魂之中，并宣扬世界的永恒性。然而，即使是埃克哈特最严厉的批评者也认为他是正统的：错误在于将他的一些言论按字面意思而非象征意义来解读，而这正是他本意。埃克哈特是一位诗人，他非常喜爱悖论和隐喻。虽然他认为信仰上帝是理性的，但他他否认仅凭理性就能对神性形成任何充分的概念：“对可知事物的证明要么诉诸感官，要么诉诸理智，”他辩称，“但对于上帝的认识，既不能通过感官知觉来证明，因为祂是无形的；也不能通过理智来证明，因为祂没有任何我们所知的形式。” ⁵⁹上帝并非像任何普通的思维对象那样，其存在可以被证明。

Meister Eckhart, for example, who greatly influenced Tauler and Suso, was himself influenced by Denys the Areopagite and Maimonides. A Dominican friar, he was a brilliant intellectual and lectured on Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris. In 1325, however, his mystical teaching brought him into conflict with his bishop, the Archbishop of Cologne, who arraigned him for heresy: he was charged with denying the goodness of God, with claiming that God himself was born in the soul and with preaching the eternity of the world. Yet even some of Eckhart’s severest critics believed that he was orthodox: the mistake lay in interpreting some of his remarks literally instead of symbolically, as intended. Eckhart was a poet, who thoroughly enjoyed paradox and metaphor. While he believed that it was rational to believe in God, he denied that reason alone could form any adequate conception of the divine nature: “The proof of a knowable thing is made to either the senses or the intellect,” he argued, “but as regards the knowledge of God there can be neither a demonstration from sensory perception, since He is incorporeal, nor from the intellect, since He lacks any form known to us.”⁵⁹ God was not another being whose existence could be proved like any normal object of thought.

埃克哈特宣称，上帝是虚无。⁶⁰这并非意味着上帝是幻象，而是指上帝拥有比我们所知的更为丰富、更为圆满的存在。他还称上帝为“黑暗”，并非指没有光，而是指某种更光明的存在。埃克哈特也区分了“神性”（最好用“沙漠”、“荒野”、“黑暗”和“虚无”等否定词来描述）和我们所认识的圣父、圣子和圣灵。 ⁶¹作为西方人，埃克哈特喜欢用奥古斯丁关于三位一体的比喻来阐释人类心灵，并暗示尽管三位一体的教义无法通过理性来认识，但只有理智才能将上帝感知为三个位格：一旦神秘主义者与上帝合一，他或她便会将上帝视为一体。希腊人不会喜欢这种观点，但埃克哈特会同意他们的看法，即三位一体本质上是一种神秘主义教义。他喜欢谈论圣父在灵魂中孕育圣子，如同玛利亚在子宫中孕育基督一般。鲁米也曾将先知耶稣的童贞女降生视为神秘主义者心中灵魂诞生的象征。埃克哈特则坚持认为，这是灵魂与上帝合作的寓言。

God, Eckhart declared, was Nothing.⁶⁰ This did not mean that he was an illusion but that God enjoyed a richer, fuller type of existence than that known to us. He also called God “darkness,” not to denote the absence of light but to indicate the presence of something brighter. Eckhart also distinguished between the “Godhead,” which was best described in negative terms, such as “desert,” “wilderness,” “darkness” and “nothing,” and the God who is known to us as Father, Son and Spirit.⁶¹ As a Westerner, Eckhart liked to use Augustine’s analogy of the Trinity in the human mind and implied that even though the doctrine of the Trinity could not be known by reason, it was only the intellect which perceived God as Three persons: once the mystic had achieved union with God, he or she saw him as One. The Greeks would not have liked this idea, but Eckhart would have agreed with them that the Trinity was essentially a mystical doctrine. He liked to talk about the Father engendering the Son in the soul, rather as Mary had conceived Christ in the womb. Rumi had also seen the Virgin Birth of the Prophet Jesus as a symbol for the birth of the soul in the heart of the mystic. It was, Eckhart insisted, an allegory of the cooperation of the soul with God.

上帝只能通过神秘体验来认识。正如迈蒙尼德所建议的，最好用否定性的术语来谈论他。的确，我们必须净化我们对上帝的观念，摒弃那些荒谬的先入之见和拟人化的意象。我们甚至应该避免使用“上帝”这个词本身。这正是埃克哈特所说的：“人最终也是最高的离别，就是为了上帝而与上帝告别。” ⁶²这将是一个痛苦的过程。既然上帝是虚无，我们也必须准备好成为虚无，才能与他合一。埃克哈特谈到了一个类似于苏菲派的雅娜所描述的过程，即“超脱”，或者更确切地说是“分离”（Abgeschiedenheit）。⁶³正如穆斯林将崇拜真主以外的任何事物视为偶像崇拜（ shirk ）一样，埃克哈特教导说，神秘主义者必须拒绝被任何关于神圣的有限观念所奴役。唯有如此，他才能与真主合一，从而“真主的存在必定是我的存在，真主的‘存在性’（Istigkeit）必定是我的‘存在性’” ^。64因为真主是存在的基础，无需“在外面”寻找他，也无需设想攀登到我们所知世界之外的某个地方。

God could only be known by mystical experience. It was better to speak of him in negative terminology, as Maimonides had suggested. Indeed, we had to purify our conception of God, getting rid of our ridiculous preconceptions and anthropomorphic imagery. We should even avoid using the term “God” itself. This is what Eckhart meant when he said: “Man’s last and highest parting is when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of God.”⁶² It would be a painful process. Since God was Nothing, we had to be prepared to be nothing too in order to become one with him. In a process similar to that Jana described by the Sufis, Eckhart spoke of “detachment” or, rather, “separateness” (Abgeschiedenheit).⁶³ In much the same way as a Muslim considers the veneration of anything other than God himself as idolatry (shirk), Eckhart taught that the mystic must refuse to be enslaved by any finite ideas about the divine. Only thus would he achieve identity with God, whereby “God’s existence must be my existence and God’s Is-ness (Istigkeit) is my is-ness.”⁶⁴ Since God was the ground of being, there was no need to seek him “out there” or envisage an ascent to something beyond the world we knew.

哈拉吉高呼“我即真理”，激怒了乌里玛（伊斯兰教法学家）。埃克哈特的神秘主义教义也令德国主教们震惊：一个普通人竟能与神合一，这究竟意味着什么？十四世纪，希腊神学家们就此问题展开了激烈的辩论。既然神本质上是不可接近的，他又如何能与人类沟通呢？如果神的本质与他的“活动”或“能量”之间存在区别，正如教父们所教导的那样，那么将基督徒在祈祷中遇到的“神”与神本身相提并论，岂不是亵渎神明吗？萨洛尼基大主教格里高利·帕拉马斯教导说，尽管这看似矛盾，但任何基督徒都可以直接认识神本身。诚然，神的本质始终超越了我们的理解，但他的“能量”并非与神本身分离，也不应被视为神圣的余晖。一位犹太神秘主义者会同意这种说法：至高无上的神（En Sof）永远笼罩在不可穿透的黑暗之中，但他的质点（sefiroth，对应于希腊人的“能量”）本身就是神圣的，永恒地从神性的核心流淌而出。有时，人们可以直接看到或体验到这些“能量”，正如圣经中所说的，上帝的“荣耀”显现了。没有人见过上帝的本质，但这并不意味着直接体验上帝本身是不可能的。这种说法看似矛盾，但这丝毫没有困扰帕拉马斯。希腊人早已达成共识，任何关于上帝的陈述都必须是悖论。只有这样，人们才能保持对上帝的神秘和不可言喻的感知。帕拉马斯这样解释道：

Al-Hallaj had antagonized the ulema by crying: “I am the Truth” and Eckhart’s mystical doctrine shocked the bishops of Germany: what did it mean to say that a mere man or woman could become one with God? During the fourteenth century, Greek theologians debated this question furiously. Since God was essentially inaccessible, how could he communicate himself to mankind? If there was a distinction between God’s essence and his “activities” or “energies,” as the Fathers had taught, surely it was blasphemous to compare the “God” that a Christian encountered in prayer with God himself? Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Saloniki, taught that, paradoxical as it might seem, any Christian could enjoy such a direct knowledge of God himself. True, God’s essence was always beyond our comprehension, but his “energies” were not distinct from God and should not be considered a mere divine afterglow. A Jewish mystic would have agreed: God En Sof would always remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness, but his sefiroth (which corresponded to the Greeks’ “energies”) were themselves divine, flowing eternally from the heart of the Godhead. Sometimes men and women could see or experience these “energies” directly, as when the Bible said that God’s “glory” had appeared. Nobody had ever seen God’s essence, but that did not mean that a direct experience of God himself was impossible. The fact that this assertion was paradoxical did not distress Palamas in the least. It had long been agreed by the Greeks that any statement about God had to be a paradox. Only thus could people retain a sense of his mystery and ineffability. Palamas put it this way:

帕拉马斯的教义并无新意：早在十一世纪，新神学家西蒙就已阐述过类似的观点。然而，卡拉布里亚人巴拉姆对帕拉马斯提出了挑战。巴拉姆曾在意大利求学，深受托马斯·阿奎那的理性主义亚里士多德思想的影响。他反对希腊传统中关于上帝“本质”与“能量”的区分，指责帕拉马斯将上帝分裂成两个独立的部分。巴拉姆提出了一种回归古希腊理性主义者的上帝定义，强调上帝的绝对纯粹性。巴拉姆认为，像亚里士多德这样的希腊哲学家，其思想尤其……受神启迪的巴拉姆认为，上帝是不可知的，远离尘世。因此，人不可能“看见”上帝：人类只能通过经文或造物奇观间接地感受到上帝的影响。1341年，巴拉姆被东正教教会会议谴责，但其他受托马斯·阿奎那影响的修士支持他。这实际上演变成神秘主义者的上帝与哲学家的上帝之间的冲突。巴拉姆及其支持者，如格里高利·阿金迪诺斯（他喜欢引用希腊语版的《神学大全》）、尼基弗拉斯·格里高拉斯和托马斯主义者普罗霍罗斯·西多尼斯，都与拜占庭的否定神学——强调沉默、悖论和神秘——渐行渐远。他们更倾向于西欧更为积极的神学，这种神学将上帝定义为存在而非虚无。与德尼、西蒙和帕拉马斯笔下神秘的神祇不同，他们树立了一个可以被描述、可以被阐释的神。希腊人一直对西方思想中的这种倾向抱有怀疑，面对理性主义拉丁思想的渗透，帕拉马斯重申了东正教的悖论神学。神不应被简化为一个可以用人类语言表达的概念。他同意巴拉姆的观点，认为神是不可知的，但他坚持认为，尽管如此，世人仍然体验过神的存在。在塔博尔山上照亮耶稣人性的光芒并非无人见过的神的本质，而是神本身以某种神秘的方式显现。根据希腊神学，那体现正统观点的礼仪宣称，在塔博尔山上：“我们看见了圣父如光，圣灵如光。”这是一种启示，揭示了“我们曾经是什么，以及当我们像基督一样成神时，我们将成为什么”。⁶⁶再次强调，我们今生默想上帝时所“看到”的，并非上帝的替代品，而是上帝本身。这当然自相矛盾，但基督教的上帝本身就是一个悖论：面对我们称之为“上帝”的奥秘，唯有沉默和反抗才是正确的姿态——而非试图用哲学上的傲慢来掩盖一切难题。

There was nothing new in Palamas’s doctrine: it had been outlined during the eleventh century by Symeon the New Theologian. But Palamas was challenged by Barlaam the Calabrian, who had studied in Italy and been strongly influenced by the rationalistic Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas. He opposed the traditional Greek distinction between God’s “essence” and his “energies,” accusing Palamas of splitting God into two separate parts. Barlaam proposed a definition of God that went back to the ancient Greek rationalists and emphasized his absolute simplicity. Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who, Barlaam claimed, had been specially enlightened by God, taught that God was unknowable and remote from the world. It was not possible, therefore, for men and women to “see” God: human beings could only sense his influence indirectly in scripture or the wonders of creation. Barlaam was condemned by a Council of the Orthodox Church in 1341 but was supported by other monks who had also been influenced by Aquinas. Basically this had become a conflict between the God of the mystics and the God of the philosophers. Barlaam and his supporters Gregory Akindynos (who liked to quote the Greek version of the Summa Theologiae), Nicephoras Gregoras and the Thomist Prochoros Cydones had all become alienated from the apophatic theology of Byzantium with its stress on silence, paradox and mystery. They preferred the more positive theology of Western Europe, which defined God as Being rather than as Nothing. Against the mysterious deity of Denys, Symeon and Palamas, they set up a God about which it was possible to make statements. The Greeks had always distrusted this tendency in Western thought and, in the face of this infiltration of rationalistic Latin ideas, Palamas reasserted the paradoxical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy. God must not be reduced to a concept that could be expressed by a human word. He agreed with Barlaam that God was unknowable but insisted that he had nonetheless been experienced by men and women. The light that had transfigured the humanity of Jesus on Mount Tabor was not God’s essence, which no man had seen, but was in some mysterious way God himself. The liturgy which, according to Greek theology, enshrined orthodox opinion, proclaimed that on Tabor: “We have seen the Father as light and the Spirit as light.” It had been a revelation of “what we once were and what we are to be” when, like Christ, we become deified.⁶⁶ Again, what we “saw” when we contemplated God in this life was not a substitute for God but was somehow God himself. Of course this was a contradiction, but the Christian God was a paradox: antimony and silence represented the only correct posture before the mystery that we called “God”—not a philosophical hubris which tried to iron out the difficulties.

巴拉姆试图将上帝的概念表述得过于一致：在他看来，上帝要么等同于他的本质，要么就不是。他试图将上帝局限于他的本质之内，并声称上帝不可能以“能量”的形式存在于本质之外。但这实际上是将上帝视为其他任何现象，并且完全基于人类对可能与不可能的认知。帕拉马斯则坚持认为，对上帝的感知是一种相互的狂喜：男女超越了自身，而上帝也经历了超越的狂喜。上帝超越“自身”，使祂的造物能够认识祂：“上帝也从自身中走出来，以屈尊俯就的方式与我们的心灵合而为一。” ⁶⁷帕拉马斯的神学在东正教中仍是规范，他战胜了十四世纪的希腊理性主义者，这代表着神秘主义在所有三大一神教中更广泛的胜利。自十一世纪以来，穆斯林哲学家们就得出结论：理性——尽管它在医学或科学等领域不可或缺——但在研究上帝时却显得十分不足。仅仅依靠理性，就好比试图用叉子喝汤。

Barlaam had tried to make the concept of God too consistent: in his view, either God was to be identified with his essence or he was not. He had tried, as it were, to confine God to his essence and say that it was impossible for him to be present outside it in his “energies.” But that was to think about God as though he were any other phenomenon and was based on purely human notions of what was or was not possible. Palamas insisted that the vision of God was a mutual ecstasy: men and women transcend themselves but God also underwent the ecstasy of transcendence by going beyond “himself” in order to make himself known to his creatures: “God also comes out of himself and becomes united with our minds by condescension.”⁶⁷ The victory of Palamas, whose theology remained normative in Orthodox Christianity, over the Greek rationalists of the fourteenth century represents a wider triumph for mysticism in all three monotheistic religions. Since the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers had come to the conclusion that reason—which was indispensable for such studies as medicine or science—was quite inadequate when it came to the study of God. To rely on reason alone was like attempting to eat soup with a fork.

在伊斯兰帝国的大部分地区，苏菲派的神凌驾于哲学家们的神之上。下一章我们将看到，卡巴拉的神在十六世纪的犹太灵修中占据主导地位。神秘主义比那些更偏重理性或律法主义的宗教更能深入人心。它的神能够回应人们更原始的希望、恐惧和焦虑，而这些是哲学家们所信奉的遥远的神所无法触及的。到了十四世纪，西方也创立了自己的神秘宗教，并取得了非常可喜的开端。但西方的神秘主义从未像在其他传统中那样广泛传播。在孕育了众多杰出神秘主义者的英国、德国和低地国家，十六世纪的新教改革者谴责这种不符合圣经的灵修方式。在罗马天主教会，像阿维拉的圣特蕾莎这样的著名神秘主义者也经常受到反宗教改革时期宗教裁判所的威胁。宗教改革使欧洲开始以更加理性主义的视角看待上帝。

The God of the Sufis had gained ascendency over the God of the philosophers in most parts of the Islamic empire. In the next chapter we shall see that the God of the Kabbalists became dominant in Jewish spirituality during the sixteenth century. Mysticism was able to penetrate the mind more deeply than the more cerebral or legalistic types of religion. Its God could address more primitive hopes, fears and anxieties before which the remote God of the philosophers was impotent. By the fourteenth century the West had launched its own mystical religion and made a very promising start. But mysticism in the West would never become as widespread as in the other traditions. In England, Germany and the Lowlands, which had produced such distinguished mystics, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century decried this unbiblical spirituality. In the Roman Catholic Church, leading mystics like St. Teresa of Avila were often threatened by the Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation. As a result of the Reformation, Europe began to see God in still more rationalistic terms.

8.

改革者的上帝

8

A God for Reformers

T十五、十六世纪对所有信奉上帝的人而言都是至关重要的。对于基督教西方而言，这是一个尤为关键的时期。西方不仅成功追赶上了其他文明，而且即将超越它们。这两个世纪见证了意大利文艺复兴的兴起（并迅速传播到北欧）、新大陆的发现以及科学革命的开端，而科学革命将对世界其他地区产生深远的影响。到十六世纪末，西方即将创造一种截然不同的文化。因此，这是一个转型时期，既充满成就，也伴随着焦虑。这一点在当时西方对上帝的理解中体现得尤为明显。尽管世俗生活取得了成功，欧洲人却比以往任何时候都更加关注他们的信仰。信徒们尤其对中世纪的宗教形式感到不满，认为这些形式已无法满足他们在崭新世界中的需求。伟大的改革家们表达了这种不安，并探索了思考上帝和救赎的新途径。这使欧洲分裂成两大敌对阵营——天主教和新教——彼此间的仇恨和猜忌从未完全消除。宗教改革期间，天主教和新教的改革者都敦促信徒摒弃对圣徒和天使的无关崇拜，一心只敬拜上帝。的确，当时的欧洲似乎对上帝近乎痴迷。然而到了十七世纪初，一些人却开始幻想“无神论”。这是否意味着他们准备抛弃上帝呢？

THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultures of the Oikumene but was about to overtake them. These centuries saw the Italian Renaissance, which quickly spread to Northern Europe, the discovery of the New World and the beginning of the scientific revolution, which would have fateful consequences for the rest of the world. By the end of the sixteenth century, the West was about to create an entirely different kind of culture. It was, therefore, a time of transition and, as such, characterized by anxiety as well as achievement. This was evident in the Western conception of God at this time. Despite their secular success, people in Europe were more concerned about their faith than ever before. The laity were especially dissatisfied with the medieval forms of religion that no longer answered their needs in the brave new world. Great reformers gave voice to this disquiet and discovered new ways of considering God and salvation. This split Europe into two warring camps—Catholic and Protestant—which have never entirely lost their hatred and suspicion of one another. During the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant reformers urged the faithful to rid themselves of peripheral devotion to saints and angels and to concentrate on God alone. Indeed, Europe seemed obsessed by God. Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century, some were fantasizing about “atheism.” Did this mean that they were ready to get rid of God?

对于希腊人、犹太人和穆斯林来说，这也是一段危机时期。1453年，奥斯曼土耳其人征服了基督教首都君士坦丁堡。他们摧毁了拜占庭帝国。从此，俄罗斯的基督徒将延续希腊人发展起来的传统和精神信仰。1492年1月，即克里斯托弗·哥伦布发现新大陆的那一年，费迪南德和伊莎贝拉征服了西班牙的格拉纳达，这是欧洲最后一个穆斯林据点：之后，穆斯林被驱逐出伊比利亚半岛，而这片土地曾是他们生活了800年的家园。穆斯林统治下的西班牙的覆灭对犹太人来说是致命的。1492年3月，在格拉纳达被征服几周后，基督教君主让西班牙犹太人在受洗或被驱逐之间做出选择。许多西班牙犹太人对故土深怀眷恋，最终皈依了基督教，尽管有些人仍然秘密地信奉基督教：就像从伊斯兰教皈依基督教的摩里斯科人一样，这些犹太皈依者也因被怀疑是异端而遭到宗教裁判所的迫害。然而，约有15万犹太人拒绝受洗，并被强行驱逐出西班牙：他们逃往土耳其、巴尔干半岛和北非避难。西班牙的穆斯林曾给予犹太人在流散期间最好的家园，因此，西班牙犹太人的灭绝被世界各地的犹太人视为自公元70年圣殿被毁以来他们民族遭遇的最大灾难。流亡的经历比以往任何时候都更深刻地融入了犹太人的宗教意识：它催生了一种新的卡巴拉形式，并促成了一种新的上帝观念的形成。

It was also a period of crisis for Greeks, Jews and Muslims. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered the Christian capital of Constantinople and destroyed the empire of Byzantium. Henceforth the Christians of Russia would continue the traditions and spirituality developed by the Greeks. In January 1492, the year of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in Spain, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe: later Muslims would be expelled from the Iberian peninsula, which had been their home for 800 years. The destruction of Muslim Spain was fatal for the Jews. In March 1492, a few weeks after the conquest of Granada, the Christian monarchs gave Spanish Jews the choice of baptism or expulsion. Many of the Spanish Jews were so attached to their home that they became Christians, though some continued to practice their faith in secret: like the Moriscos, the converts from Islam, these Jewish converts were then hounded by the Inquisition because they were suspected of heresy. Some 150,000 Jews refused baptism, however, and were forcibly deported from Spain: they took refuge in Turkey, the Balkans and North Africa. The Muslims of Spain had given Jews the best home they had ever had in the diaspora, so the annihilation of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews throughout the world as the greatest disaster to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in CE 70. The experience of exile entered more deeply into Jewish religious consciousness than ever before: it led to a new form of Kabbalah and the evolution of a new conception of God.

对于世界其他地区的穆斯林而言，这些年同样充满挑战。蒙古入侵之后的几个世纪，或许不可避免地导致了新的保守主义的兴起，人们试图重拾失去的一切。十五世纪，逊尼派伊斯兰学校（经学院）的学者们宣布“独立思考（ ijtihad ）之门已然关闭”。从此以后，穆斯林应当效仿（taqlid）过去的伟大先贤，尤其是在学习伊斯兰教法（沙里亚）方面。在这种保守的氛围下，不太可能出现关于真主，乃至任何其他方面的创新思想。然而，将这一时期视为伊斯兰教衰落的开端是错误的，正如西欧人经常提出的那样。正如马歇尔·G·S·霍奇森在《伊斯兰的冒险：世界文明中的良知与历史》一书中指出的那样，我们对这一时期的了解还远远不够，无法做出如此笼统的概括。例如，认为当时穆斯林科学有所松懈是错误的，因为我们没有足够的证据来证明这一点。

These were also complex years for Muslims in other parts of the world. The centuries which had succeeded the Mongol invasions led—perhaps inevitably—to a new conservatism, as people tried to recover what had been lost. In the fifteenth century, the Sunni ulema of the madrasas, the schools of Islamic studies, decreed that “the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) had been closed.” Henceforth Muslims should practice “emulation” (taqlid) of the great luminaries of the past, especially in the study of Shariah, the Holy Law. It was unlikely that there would be innovative ideas about God in this conservative climate or, indeed, about anything else. Yet it would be mistaken to date this period as the beginning of a decadence in Islam, as Western Europeans have often suggested. As Marshall G. S. Hodgson points out in The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilisation, we simply do not know enough about this period to make such sweeping generalizations. It would be wrong, for example, to assume that there was a slackening in Muslim science at this time, as we have insufficient evidence, one way or the other.

保守主义倾向在十四世纪初就已出现，其代表人物包括大马士革的艾哈迈德·伊本·泰米叶（卒于1328年）及其弟子伊本·盖因·焦齐亚等伊斯兰教法拥护者。伊本·泰米叶是……深受民众爱戴的伊本·泰米叶希望扩展伊斯兰教法，使其适用于穆斯林可能遇到的所有情况。这并非意在推行压制性的教规：他希望摒弃过时的规则，使伊斯兰教法更具现实意义，并缓解穆斯林在艰难时期的焦虑。伊斯兰教法应当为他们实际的宗教问题提供清晰、合乎逻辑的答案。然而，出于对伊斯兰教法的热忱，伊本·泰米叶抨击了卡拉姆（Kalam，伊斯兰教法学派）、法尔萨法（Falsafah，伊斯兰教法哲学派）甚至阿舍尔主义（Asherism，伊斯兰教法的奠基者）。如同任何改革者一样，他希望回归本源——回归《古兰经》和圣训（伊斯兰教法的根基）——并摒弃所有后世的增补：“我考察了所有神学和哲学方法，发现它们都无法治愈任何弊病，也无法满足任何渴望。对我而言，最好的方法是回归《古兰经》。” ¹他的学生焦齐亚（al-Jawziyah）将苏菲主义也纳入了这些创新之中，主张对经文进行字面解释，并谴责对苏菲圣人的崇拜，其精神与后来欧洲的基督教改革者颇为相似。与路德和加尔文一样，伊本·泰米叶和焦齐亚在同时代人眼中并不被视为守旧派：他们被视为进步人士，希望减轻人民的负担。霍奇森告诫我们不要将这一时期的所谓保守主义简单地视为“停滞”。他指出，在我们之前的任何社会都无法负担或预见到我们如今所享有的如此规模的进步。2^西方学者常常批评十五、十六世纪的穆斯林未能充分认识到意大利文艺复兴的影响。诚然，这是历史上最伟大的文化繁荣时期之一，但它与例如中国宋朝的文化繁荣相比，并没有太大的差异或超越。宋朝的文化繁荣在十二世纪曾激励过穆斯林。文艺复兴对西方至关重要，但没有人能够预见到现代技术时代的诞生，而事后看来，文艺复兴恰恰预示了现代技术时代的到来。如果穆斯林对西方的文艺复兴感到失望，这并不必然表明他们自身文化存在无可救药的缺陷。不出所料，穆斯林更关注的是他们在十五世纪取得的相当可观的成就。

The conservative tendency had surfaced during the fourteenth century in champions of the Shariah like Ahmad ibn Taymiyah of Damascus (d. 1328) and his pupil Ibn al-Qayin al-Jawziyah. Ibn Taymiyah, who was dearly loved by the people, wanted to extend the Shariah to enable it to apply to all the circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves. This was not meant to be a repressive discipline: he wanted to shed obsolete rules to make the Shariah more relevant and to assuage the anxiety of Muslims during these difficult times. The Shariah should provide them with a clear, logical answer to their practical religious problems. But in his zeal for Shariah, Ibn Taymiyah attacked Kalam, Falsafah and even Asherism. Like any reformer, he wanted to go back to the sources—to the Koran and the hadith (on which the Shariah had been based)—and to shed all later accretions: “I have examined all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of curing any ills or of quenching any thirst. For me the best method is that of the Koran.”¹ His pupil al-Jawziyah added Sufism to this list of innovations, advocating a literalist interpretation of scripture and condemning the cult of Sufi saints in a spirit that was not entirely dissimilar to that of the later Protestant Reformers in Europe. Like Luther and Calvin, Ibn Taymiyah and al-Jawziyah were not regarded by their contemporaries as backward-looking: they were seen as progressives, who wanted to lighten the burden of their people. Hodgson warns us not to dismiss the so-called conservatism of this period as “stagnation.” He points out that no society before our own could either afford or envisage progress on the scale that we now enjoy.² Western scholars have often chided the Muslims of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for failing to take account of the Italian Renaissance. True, this was one of the great cultural florescences of history, but it did not exceed or differ much from that of the Sung dynasty in China, for example, which had been an inspiration to Muslims during the twelfth century. The Renaissance was crucial to the West, but nobody could have foreseen the birth of the modern technical age, which, with hindsight, we can see that it foreshadowed. If Muslims were underwhelmed by this Western Renaissance, this did not necessarily reveal an irredeemable cultural inadequacy. Muslims were, not surprisingly, more concerned with their own not inconsiderable achievements during the fifteenth century.

事实上，伊斯兰在这一时期仍然是世界最强大的力量，西方世界也恐惧地意识到，它已近在咫尺，即将征服欧洲。在十五、十六世纪，三个新的穆斯林帝国相继建立：奥斯曼土耳其人在小亚细亚和东欧建立帝国，萨法维王朝在伊朗建立帝国，莫卧儿王朝在印度建立帝国。这些新的尝试表明，伊斯兰精神远未消亡，它仍然能够激励穆斯林再次崛起，创造新的未来。灾难与瓦解之后，这些帝国都取得了成功。每个帝国都经历了各自独特的文化繁荣：伊朗和中亚的萨法维王朝复兴与意大利文艺复兴有着惊人的相似之处：两者都以绘画为主要表现形式，并认为他们是在创造性地回归其文化的异教根源。然而，尽管这三个帝国拥有强大的力量和辉煌的成就，所谓的保守精神仍然盛行。早期的神秘主义者和哲学家，如法拉比和伊本·阿拉比，都致力于开拓创新，而这一时期则呈现出对旧主题的微妙而精炼的重述。这使得西方人更难理解这一时期，因为我们自己的学者长期以来忽视了这些更为现代的伊斯兰探索，也因为哲学家和诗人期望他们的读者心中充满着过去的意象和思想。

In fact Islam was still the greatest world power during this period, and the West was fearfully aware that it was now on the very threshold of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, three new Muslim empires were founded: by the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor and Eastern Europe, by the Safavids in Iran and by the Moghuls in India. These new ventures show that the Islamic spirit was by no means moribund but could still provide Muslims with the inspiration to rise again to new success after catastrophe and disintegration. Each of the empires achieved its own remarkable cultural florescence: the Safavid renaissance in Iran and Central Asia was interestingly similar to the Italian Renaissance: both expressed themselves preeminently in painting and felt that they were returning creatively to the pagan roots of their culture. Despite the power and magnificence of these three empires, however, what has been called the conservative spirit still prevailed. Where earlier mystics and philosophers like al-Farabi and Ibn al-Arabi had been conscious of breaking new ground, this period saw a subtle and delicate restatement of old themes. This makes it more difficult for Westerners to appreciate, because our own scholars have ignored these more modern Islamic ventures for too long, and also because the philosophers and poets expect the minds of their readers to be stocked with the images and ideas of the past.

然而，这与当时西方的发展有着相似之处。在萨法维王朝统治下，一种新型的十二伊玛目派什叶派成为伊朗的国教，这标志着什叶派与逊尼派之间前所未有的敌对关系的开始。此前，什叶派与更注重知识或神秘主义的逊尼派有很多共同之处。但在十六世纪，这两个派别形成了对立阵营，不幸的是，这与当时欧洲的教派战争有着惊人的相似之处。萨法维王朝的创始人沙阿·伊斯玛仪于1503年在阿塞拜疆掌权，并将势力扩展到伊朗西部和伊拉克。他决心消灭逊尼派，并以前所未有的残酷手段强迫臣民皈依什叶派。他自视为他那一代的伊玛目。这场运动与欧洲的宗教改革有相似之处：两者都源于抗议的传统，都反对贵族统治，并且都与君主制政府的建立有关。改革后的什叶派在其领土内废除了苏菲教团，其做法令人想起新教徒解散修道院的行径。不出所料，这激发了奥斯曼帝国逊尼派穆斯林类似的强硬态度，后者在其领土内镇压什叶派。奥斯曼人自视为对抗西方十字军东征的最新圣战的前线，因此也对其基督教臣民采取了新的强硬态度。然而，将整个伊朗政权都视为狂热分子则是一种误解。伊朗的什叶派乌里玛对改革后的什叶派持怀疑态度：与逊尼派乌里玛不同，他们拒绝“关闭伊智提哈德之门”，坚持自己有权独立于沙阿解释伊斯兰教义。他们拒绝承认萨法维王朝（以及后来的卡扎尔王朝）是伊玛目的继承人。他们与人民结盟，反对统治者，成为伊斯法罕乃至后来的德黑兰民众反抗王室压迫的捍卫者。他们形成了维护商人和穷人权利、抵制沙阿侵犯的传统，正是这种传统使他们能够在1979年动员人民反对沙阿穆罕默德·礼萨·巴列维的腐败政权。

There were parallels with contemporary Western developments, however. A new type of Twelver Shiism had become the state religion in Iran under the Safavids, and this marks the beginning of a hostility between the Shiah and the Sunnah which was unprecedented. Hitherto Shiis had had much in common with the more intellectual or mystical Sunnis. But during the sixteenth century, the two formed rival camps that were unhappily similar to the sectarian wars in Europe at this time. Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, had come to power in Azerbaijan in 1503 and had extended his power into western Iran and Iraq. He was determined to wipe out Sunnism and forced the Shiah on his subjects with a ruthlessness rarely attempted before. He saw himself as the Imam of his generation. This movement had similarities with the Protestant Reformation in Europe: both had their roots in traditions of protest, both were against the aristocracy and associated with the establishment of royal governments. The reformed Shiis abolished the Sufi tariqas in their territories in a way that recalls the Protestant dissolution of the monasteries. Not surprisingly, they inspired a similar intransigence among the Sunnis of the Ottoman empire, who suppressed the Shiah in their territories. Seeing themselves on the front line of the latest holy war against the crusading West, the Ottomans also cultivated a new intransigence toward their Christian subjects. It would, however, be a mistake to see the whole of the Iranian establishment as fanatical. The Shii ulema of Iran looked askance at this reformed Shiah: unlike their Sunni counterparts, they refused to “close the gates of ijtihad” and insisted on their right to interpret Islam independently of the shahs. They refused to accept the Safavi—and later the Qajar—dynasty as the successor of the Imams. Instead they allied themselves with the people against the rulers and became the champions of the ummab against royal oppression in Isfahan and, later, Teheran. They developed a tradition of upholding the rights of the merchants and of the poor against the encroachments of the shahs, and it was this that enabled them to mobilize the people against Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s corrupt regime in 1979.

伊朗什叶派也发展出了自己的哲学体系（Falsafah），延续了苏赫拉瓦尔迪的神秘主义传统。什叶派哲学体系的创始人米尔·达马德（卒于1631年）既是科学家又是神学家。他将神圣之光与穆罕默德和伊玛目等象征性人物的启蒙联系起来。与苏赫拉瓦尔迪一样，他强调宗教体验中无意识的心理因素。然而，这一伊朗学派的最高代表人物是米尔·达马德的弟子萨德尔·丁·设拉子，通常被称为穆拉·萨德拉（约1571-1640年）。如今许多穆斯林认为他是所有伊斯兰思想家中最为深刻的一位，并声称他的著作体现了形而上学与灵性融合的精髓，而这种融合已成为伊斯兰哲学的特征。然而，他在西方才刚刚为人所知，截至本文撰写之时，他的众多论著中只有一部被翻译成英文。

The Shiis of Iran also developed their own Falsafah, which continued the mystical traditions of Suhrawardi. Mir Damad (d. 1631), the founder of this Shii Falsafah, was a scientist as well as a theologian. He identified the divine Light with the enlightenment of such symbolic figures as Muhammad and the Imams. Like Suhrawardi, he emphasized the unconscious, psychological element of religious experience. The supreme exponent of this Iranian school, however, was Mir Damad’s disciple Sadr al-Din Shirazi, who is usually known as Mulla Sadra (ca. 1571–1640). Many Muslims today regard him as the most profound of all the Islamic thinkers, claiming that his work epitomizes the fusion of metaphysics and spirituality that had come to characterize Muslim philosophy. He is only just becoming known in the West, however, and at this writing only one of his many treatises has been translated into English.

与苏赫拉瓦尔迪一样，穆拉·萨德拉也认为知识并非仅仅是获取信息，而是一个转化的过程。苏赫拉瓦尔迪所描述的“神秘世界”（alam al-mithal）对他的思想至关重要：他本人将梦境和幻象视为真理的最高形式。因此，伊朗什叶派仍然认为神秘主义而非纯粹的科学和形而上学才是发现上帝的最佳途径。穆拉·萨德拉教导说，模仿上帝（imitatio dei，即接近上帝）是哲学的目标，并且不能局限于任何单一的信条或信仰。正如伊本·西那所论证的那样，唯有上帝，作为至高无上的实在，才拥有真正的存在（wujud），而这一唯一的实在贯穿了从神圣领域到尘世的整个存在链条。穆拉·萨德拉并非泛神论者。他只是将上帝视为万物之源：我们所见所闻的存在，仅仅是承载着神圣之光的有限容器。然而，上帝也超越了世俗的现实。万物一体并非指上帝独有，而是类似于太阳与其辐射出的光束的统一性。与伊本·阿拉比一样，穆拉·萨德拉也区分了上帝的本质或“盲目”及其各种显现。他的见解与希腊静修主义者和卡巴拉学者的观点颇为相似。他认为整个宇宙都从“盲目”中辐射而出，形成一颗层层叠叠的“宝石”。这也可以说是对应于上帝在其属性或“迹象”（ ayat ）中逐步展现自我的程度。它们也代表了人类回归存在之源的各个阶段。

Like Suhrawardi, Mulla Sadra believed that knowledge was not simply a matter of acquiring information but a process of transformation. The alam al-mithal described by Suhrawardi was crucial to his thought: he himself saw dreams and visions as the highest form of truth. Iranian Shiism was, therefore, still continuing to see mysticism as the most appropriate tool for the discovery of God rather than pure science and metaphysics. Mulla Sadra taught that the imitatio dei, the approximation of God, was the goal of philosophy and could not be confined to any one creed or faith. As Ibn Sina had demonstrated, God, the supreme reality, alone had true existence (wujud), and this single reality informs the whole chain of being from the divine realm to the dust. Mulla Sadra was not a pantheist. He simply saw God as the source of all things that exist: the beings that we see and experience are only vessels that contain the divine Light in a limited form. Yet God also transcends mundane reality. The unity of all being does not mean that God alone exists, but is similar to the unity of the sun with the beams of light that radiate from it. Like Ibn al-Arabi, Mulla Sadra distinguished between God’s essence or “the Blindness” and its various manifestations. His vision is not dissimilar to that of the Greek hesychasts and the Kabbalists. He saw the whole cosmos radiating from the Blindness to form a “single jewel” with many layers, which can also be said to correspond to the gradations of God’s unfolding self-revelation in his attributes or “signs” (ayat). They also represent the stages of humanity’s return to the Source of being.

与神合一并非来世的专属。如同一些静修者一样，穆拉·萨德拉相信，通过知识，今生即可实现与神的合一。毋庸置疑，他所指的并非仅仅是理性的知识：在通往神的道路上，这位神秘主义者必须穿越“阿拉姆·米塔尔”（alam al-mithal），即视觉和想象的领域。神并非一个可以客观认知的实体，而是存在于每个穆斯林的想象能力之中。当《古兰经》或圣训提及天堂、地狱或神的宝座时，它们指的并非一个独立于世的实体，而是一个隐藏在感官现象面纱之下的内在世界。

Union with God was not reserved for the next world. Like some of the hesychasts, Mulla Sadra believed that it could be realized in this life by means of knowledge. Needless to say, he did not mean cerebral, rational knowledge alone: in his ascent to God the mystic had to travel through the alam al-mithal, the realm of vision and imagination. God is not a reality that can be known objectively, but will be found within the image-making faculty of each individual Muslim. When the Koran or the hadith speak of Paradise, Hell or the throne of God, they are not referring to a reality that was in a separate location but to an inner world, hidden beneath the veils of sensible phenomena:

如同他极为敬仰的伊本·阿拉比一样，穆拉·萨德拉并不认为上帝存在于另一个世界，一个外在的、客观的天堂，所有信徒死后都将前往那里。天堂和神圣领域应该在自我之内发现，在每个人不可剥夺的个人内在本质（alam al-mithal）之中。没有两个人会拥有完全相同的天堂或完全相同的上帝。

Like Ibn al-Arabi, whom he greatly revered, Mulla Sadra did not envisage God sitting in another world, an external, objective heaven to which all the faithful would repair after death. Heaven and the divine sphere were to be discovered within the self, in the personal alam al-mithal which was the inalienable possession of every single human being. No two people would have exactly the same heaven or the same God.

穆拉·萨德拉既尊崇逊尼派、苏菲派和希腊哲学家，也敬仰什叶派伊玛目，他提醒我们，伊朗什叶派并非总是排外和狂热的。在印度，许多穆斯林也培养了对其他传统的类似宽容态度。尽管伊斯兰教在莫卧儿王朝统治下的印度文化中占据主导地位，但印度教依然充满活力和创造力，一些穆斯林和印度教徒在艺术和学术领域开展合作。次大陆长期以来没有宗教不宽容现象，在十四和十五世纪，最具创造力的印度教形式强调宗教追求的统一性：所有道路都是有效的，只要它们都强调对唯一真神的内在之爱。这显然与苏菲主义和哲学（Falsafah）产生了共鸣，而苏菲主义和哲学正是……印度当时最主要的伊斯兰教思潮是……一些穆斯林和印度教徒组成了跨宗教社团，其中最重要的就是锡克教，它由古鲁·纳马克于十五世纪创立。这种新的一神论认为真主（安拉）与印度教的上帝是同一的。在穆斯林方面，伊朗学者米尔·阿布·卡西姆·芬迪里斯基（卒于1641年）与米尔·达马德和穆拉·萨德拉是同时代人，他在伊斯法罕教授伊本·西那的著作，同时也在印度花费大量时间研究印度教和瑜伽。很难想象当时一位研究托马斯·阿奎那的罗马天主教专家会对一个甚至不属于亚伯拉罕宗教传统的宗教表现出如此的热情。

Mulla Sadra, who venerated Sunni, Sufi and Greek philosophers as well as the Shiite Imams, reminds us that Iranian Shiism was not always exclusive and fanatical. In India, many of the Muslims had cultivated a similar tolerance toward other traditions. Although Islam predominated culturally in Moghul India, Hinduism remained vital and creative, and some Muslims and Hindus cooperated in the arts and in intellectual projects. The subcontinent had long been free of religious intolerance, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the most creative forms of Hinduism stressed the unity of religious aspiration: all paths were valid, provided that they emphasized an interior love for the One God. This clearly resonated with both Sufism and Falsafah, which were the most dominant Islamic moods in India. Some Muslims and Hindus formed interfaith societies, the most important of which became Sikhism, founded by Guru Namak during the fifteenth century. This new form of monotheism believed that al-Lah was identical with the God of Hinduism. On the Muslim side, the Iranian scholar Mir Abu al-Qasim Findiriski (d. 1641), the contemporary of Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra, taught the works of Ibn Sina in Isfahan but also spent a good deal of time in India studying Hinduism and Yoga. It would be difficult to imagine a Roman Catholic expert on Thomas Aquinas at this time showing a similar enthusiasm for a religion that was not even in the Abrahamic tradition.

这种宽容与合作的精神在莫卧儿王朝第三位皇帝阿克巴的政策中得到了显著体现。阿克巴于1560年至1605年在位，他尊重所有信仰。出于对印度教徒的体谅，他成为了一名素食主义者，放弃了自己曾经非常喜爱的狩猎活动，并禁止在生日或印度教圣地宰杀动物。1575年，他创建了一座礼拜堂，供各宗教的学者聚会探讨上帝。据说，来自欧洲的耶稣会传教士在这里最为活跃。他还创立了自己的苏菲教团，致力于“一神论”（tawhid-e-ilahi），宣扬一种激进的信仰，即相信只有一位上帝，祂可以在任何正统的宗教中显现自身。阿克巴的生平事迹被阿布法兹勒·阿拉米（1551-1602）在其著作《阿克巴传》（Akbar-Namah）中加以颂扬，该书试图将苏菲主义的原则应用于文明史的研究。阿拉米认为阿克巴是法尔萨法（Falsafah，伊斯兰教义）的理想统治者，也是他那个时代的完美之人。他认为，当像阿克巴这样一位统治者建立起一个宽容开放的社会，使偏见成为不可能时，文明就能走向世界和平。伊斯兰教最初“臣服于真主”的含义可以被任何信仰所理解：他所称的“穆罕默德的宗教”并非真主的专属。然而，并非所有穆斯林都认同阿克巴的愿景，许多人视他为信仰的威胁。他的宽容政策只有在莫卧儿王朝强盛时期才能得以维持。随着莫卧儿王朝的衰落，各派势力开始反抗统治，穆斯林、印度教徒和锡克教徒之间的宗教冲突也随之升级。奥朗则布皇帝（1618-1707 年）或许认为，加强穆斯林阵营内部的纪律可以恢复团结：他颁布法令，禁止饮酒等各种放纵行为，使与印度教徒的合作成为不可能，减少了印度教节日的数量，并将印度教商人的税收提高了一倍。他推行社群主义政策最引人注目的举措是对印度教寺庙的大规模破坏。这些政策彻底……推翻了阿克巴的宽容做法，在奥朗则布死后被抛弃，但莫卧儿帝国再也没有从他以神的名义释放和神圣化的破坏性偏执中恢复过来。

This spirit of tolerance and cooperation was strikingly demonstrated in the policies of Akbar, the third Moghul emperor, who reigned from 1560 to 1605 and who respected all faiths. Out of sensitivity to the Hindus, he became a vegetarian, gave up hunting—a sport he greatly enjoyed—and forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday or in the Hindu holy places. In 1575 he founded a House of Worship, where scholars from all religions could meet to discuss God. Here, apparently, the Jesuit missionaries from Europe were the most aggressive. He founded his own Sufi order, dedicated to “divine monotheism” (tawhid-e-ilahi), which proclaimed a radical belief in the one God who could reveal himself in any rightly guided religion. Akbar’s own life was eulogized by Abulfazl Allami (1551–1602) in his Akbar-Namah (The Book of Akbar), which attempted to apply the principles of Sufism to the history of civilization. Allami saw Akbar as the ideal ruler of Falsafah and the Perfect Man of his time. Civilization could lead to universal peace when a generous, liberal society was created by a ruler like Akbar who made bigotry impossible. Islam in its original sense of “surrender” to God could be achieved by any faith: what he certainly called “Muhammad’s religion” did not have the monopoly of God. Not all Muslims shared the vision of Akbar, however, and many saw him as a danger to the faith. His tolerant policy could only be sustained while the Moghuls were in a position of strength. When their power began to decline and various groups began to revolt against the Moghul rulers, religious conflicts escalated among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. The emperor Aurengzebe (1618–1707) may have believed that unity could be restored by greater discipline within the Muslim camp: he enacted legislation to put a stop to various laxities like wine-drinking, made cooperation with Hindus impossible, reduced the number of Hindu festivals and doubled the taxes of Hindu merchants. The most spectacular expression of his communalist policies was the widespread destruction of Hindu temples. These policies, which had completely reversed the tolerant approach of Akbar, were abandoned after Aurengzebe’s death, but the Moghul empire never recovered from the destructive bigotry he had unleashed and sanctified in the name of God.

阿克巴生前最强劲的反对者之一是杰出的学者谢赫·艾哈迈德·西尔欣迪（1564-1624），他也是一位苏菲派信徒，与阿克巴一样，被自己的门徒尊为“完美之人”。西尔欣迪反对伊本·阿拉比的神秘主义传统，后者的门徒认为上帝是唯一存在的。正如我们所见，穆拉·萨德拉曾强调过这种“存在一体性”（wahdat al-wujud）的观念。这实际上是对清真言（Shahadah）的一种神秘主义式的重述：除真主（al-Lah）之外，别无存在。与其他宗教的神秘主义者一样，苏菲派信徒体验到了一种合一感，并感受到与整个存在融为一体。然而，西尔欣迪认为这种感知纯粹是主观的。当神秘主义者专注于上帝时，其他一切都会从他们的意识中淡去，但这并不符合客观现实。事实上，谈论上帝与世界之间的任何统一或同一性都是一种可怕的误解。实际上，人类根本不可能直接体验上帝，因为上帝完全超越了人类的感知范围：“祂是至圣者，超越彼岸，再超越彼岸，再超越彼岸。” ^⁴上帝与世界之间不可能存在任何联系，只能通过对自然“迹象”的沉思间接地联系。西尔欣迪声称，他本人已经超越了伊本·阿拉比等神秘主义者的狂喜状态，达到了一种更高、更清醒的意识境界。他运用神秘主义和宗教体验来重申对哲学家们所信奉的遥远上帝的信仰，这位上帝是一个客观存在却又不可接近的实在。他的观点被他的门徒们热烈拥护，但大多数穆斯林却不认同，他们仍然忠于神秘主义者所信奉的内在的、主观的上帝。

One of Akbar’s most vigorous opponents during his lifetime had been the outstanding scholar Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), who was also a Sufi and, like Akbar, was venerated as the Perfect Man by his own disciples. Sirhindi stood out against the mystical tradition of Ibn al-Arabi, whose disciples had come to see God as the only reality. As we have seen, Mulla Sadra had asserted this perception of the Oneness of Existence (wahdat al-wujud). It was a mystical restatement of the Shahadah: there was no reality but al-Lah. Like mystics in other religions, the Sufis had experienced a unity and felt one with the whole of existence. Sirhindi, however, dismissed this perception as purely subjective. While the mystic was concentrating on God alone, everything else tended to fade from his consciousness, but this did not correspond to an objective reality. Indeed, to speak of any unity or identity between God and the world was an awful misconception. In fact, there was no possibility of a direct experience of God, who was entirely beyond the reach of mankind: “He is the Holy One, beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond.”⁴ There could be no relation between God and the world, except indirectly through the contemplation of the “signs” of nature. Sirhindi claimed that he himself had passed beyond the ecstatic condition of mystics like Ibn al-Arabi to a higher and more sober state of consciousness. He used mysticism and religious experience to reaffirm belief in the distant God of the philosophers, who was an objective but inaccessible reality. His views were ardently embraced by his disciples but not by the majority of Muslims, who remained true to the immanent, subjective God of the mystics.

当芬迪里斯基和阿克巴等穆斯林寻求与其他信仰者相互理解时，基督教西方在1492年已经表明，它甚至无法容忍与亚伯拉罕的另外两种宗教有任何瓜葛。15世纪，反犹主义在欧洲愈演愈烈，犹太人被逐个驱逐出城：1421年被驱逐出林茨和维也纳，1424年被驱逐出科隆，1439年被驱逐出奥格斯堡，1442年（以及1450年）被驱逐出巴伐利亚，1454年被驱逐出摩拉维亚。他们于1485年被驱逐出佩鲁贾，1486年被驱逐出维琴察，1488年被驱逐出帕尔马，1489年被驱逐出卢卡和米兰，1494年被驱逐出托斯卡纳。西班牙塞法迪犹太人的驱逐必须放在这一更大的欧洲趋势的背景下看待。定居在奥斯曼帝国的西班牙犹太人持续遭受着一种疏离感，以及一种非理性的、难以磨灭的痛苦。幸存者的内疚感。这或许与那些在纳粹大屠杀中幸存下来的人所经历的内疚感并无太大区别，因此，今天一些犹太人被塞法迪犹太人在十六世纪发展起来的灵性所吸引，以帮助他们接受流亡的现实，这一点意义重大。

While Muslims like Findiriski and Akbar were seeking understanding with people of other faiths, the Christian West had demonstrated in 1492 that it could not even tolerate proximity with the two other religions of Abraham. During the fifteenth century, anti-Semitism had increased throughout Europe and Jews were expelled from one city after another: from Linz and Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and Moravia in 1454. They were driven out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Lucca and Milan in 1489 and Tuscany in 1494. The expulsion of the Sephardic Jews of Spain must be seen in the context of this larger European trend. The Spanish Jews who had settled in the Ottoman empire continued to suffer from a sense of dislocation coupled with the irrational but indelible guilt of the survivor. It is, perhaps, not dissimilar to the guilt experienced by those who managed to survive the Nazi Holocaust and it is significant, therefore, that today some Jews feel drawn to the spirituality that the Sephardic Jews evolved during the sixteenth century to help them to come to terms with their exile.

这种新形式的卡巴拉可能起源于奥斯曼帝国的巴尔干地区，那里聚集着许多塞法迪犹太人。1492年的悲剧似乎引发了人们对先知预言的以色列救赎的普遍渴望。一些犹太人在约瑟夫·卡罗和所罗门·阿尔卡巴兹的带领下，从希腊迁徙到以色列的故土巴勒斯坦。他们的灵性旨在治愈被驱逐给犹太人及其上帝带来的屈辱。他们说，他们想要“从尘埃中唤醒神圣的舍金纳”。但他们并非寻求政治解决方案，也没有设想犹太人更广泛地回归应许之地。他们在加利利的萨法德定居，并开启了一场非凡的神秘主义复兴运动，这场运动从他们的流离失所经历中发现了深刻的意义。此前，卡巴拉只吸引了少数精英，但在灾难之后，世界各地的犹太人都热切地转向了更加神秘的灵性追求。哲学的慰藉如今显得空洞无物：亚里士多德的理论枯燥乏味，他所信奉的上帝遥不可及。事实上，许多人将这场灾难归咎于哲学（Falsafah），声称它削弱了犹太教，淡化了以色列人的特殊使命感。哲学的普世性和对非犹太哲学的接纳，使太多犹太人放弃了洗礼。哲学再也无法在犹太教中占据重要的精神地位。

This new form of Kabbalism probably originated in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire, where many of the Sephardim had established communities. The tragedy of 1492 seems to have caused a widespread yearning for the redemption of Israel foretold by the prophets. Some Jews led by Joseph Karo and Solomon Alkabaz migrated from Greece to Palestine, the homeland of Israel. Their spirituality sought to heal the humiliation that the expulsion had inflicted upon the Jews and their God. They wanted, they said, “to raise the Shekinah from the dust.” But they were not seeking a political solution, nor did they envisage a more widespread return of the Jews to the Promised Land. They settled in Safed in Galilee and initiated a remarkable mystical revival which discovered a profound significance in their experience of homelessness. Hitherto Kabbalah had appealed only to an elite, but after the disaster Jews all over the world turned eagerly to a more mystical spirituality. The consolations of philosophy now seemed hollow: Aristotle sounded arid and his God distant and inaccessible. Indeed, many blamed Falsafah for the catastrophe, claiming that it had weakened Judaism and diluted the sense of Israel’s special vocation. Its universality and accommodation of Gentile philosophy had persuaded too many Jews to accept baptism. Never again would Falsafah be an important spirituality within Judaism.

人们渴望更直接地体验上帝。在萨法德，这种渴望近乎情欲般强烈。卡巴拉学者们常常在巴勒斯坦的山丘间游荡，躺在伟大的塔木德学者的墓前，仿佛试图将他们的洞见融入自己饱受苦难的生活中。他们常常彻夜难眠，如同失恋的恋人，吟唱着献给上帝的情歌，亲切地呼唤着他的名号。他们发现，卡巴拉的神话和修行打破了他们内心的防线，触及了他们灵魂深处的伤痛，这是形而上学或塔木德研究都无法做到的。但由于他们的处境与《佐哈尔》的作者利昂的摩西截然不同，这些西班牙流亡者需要调整摩西的洞见，使其能够契合自身的境遇。他们想出了一个极富想象力的方案，将绝对的无家可归等同于绝对的神圣。犹太人的流亡象征着一切存在的核心——根本性的失落。不仅整个受造界不再处于其应有的位置，而且上帝他仿佛被放逐出了自己的世界。萨法德的新卡巴拉几乎一夜之间风靡全球，成为一场群众运动，不仅激励了塞法迪犹太人，也为欧洲的阿什肯纳兹犹太人带来了新的希望。阿什肯纳兹犹太人发现自己在基督教世界里没有可以依靠的圣城。这一非凡的成功表明，萨法德那些奇异的、在外人看来令人费解的神话，却能触动犹太人的内心。它是最后一个几乎被所有人接受的犹太运动，深刻地改变了世界犹太人的宗教意识。卡巴拉的特殊修行方式只对少数受过启蒙的精英开放，但它的思想——以及它对上帝的理解——却成为了犹太虔诚的典型表达。

People longed for a more direct experience of God. In Safed this yearning acquired an almost erotic intensity. Kabbalists used to wander through the hills of Palestine and lie on the graves of the great Talmudists, seeking, as it were, to absorb their vision into their own troubled lives. They used to stay awake all night, sleepless as frustrated lovers, singing love songs to God and calling him fond names. They found that the mythology and disciplines of Kabbalah broke down their reserves and touched the pain in their souls in a way that metaphysics or the study of Talmud no longer could. But because their condition was so different from that of Moses of Leon, the author of The Zohar, the Spanish exiles needed to adapt his vision so that it could speak to their particular circumstances. They came up with an extraordinarily imaginative solution which equated absolute homelessness with absolute Godliness. The exile of the Jews symbolized the radical dislocation at the heart of all existence. Not only was the whole of creation no longer in its proper place, but God was in exile from himself. The new Kabbalah of Safed achieved almost overnight popularity and became a mass movement that not only inspired the Sephardim but also gave new hope to the Ashkenazim of Europe, who had discovered that they had no abiding city in Christendom. This extraordinary success shows that the strange and—to an outsider—bewildering myths of Safed had the power to speak to the condition of the Jews. It was the last Jewish movement to be accepted by almost everybody and wrought a profound change in the religious consciousness of world Jewry. The special disciplines of Kabbalah were only for an initiated elite, but its ideas—and its conception of God—became a standard expression of Jewish piety.

为了恰当地理解这种新的上帝观，我们必须明白这些神话并非意在按字面意思理解。萨法德的卡巴拉学者们意识到他们使用的意象非常大胆，因此总是用“仿佛”或“可以想象”之类的表达方式加以限定。但任何关于上帝的讨论都存在问题，尤其是圣经中关于宇宙创造的教义。卡巴拉学者们和费拉苏夫派一样，都觉得这个问题难以解答。他们都接受了柏拉图的流溢隐喻，认为上帝与永恒地从他流淌而出的世界息息相关。先知们强调上帝的神圣性以及他与世界的分离，但《佐哈尔》却认为上帝的质点（sefiroth）构成了整个现实。如果上帝是万物之源，他又怎能与世界分离呢？萨法德的摩西·本·雅各布·科尔多韦罗（1522-1570）清晰地看到了这个悖论，并试图解决它。在他的神学中，至高神（En Sof）不再是不可理解的神性，而是世界的思想：他与所有受造物在其理想的柏拉图式状态中合而为一，但又与它们在现实世界中存在的缺陷相分离。他解释说：“凡存在之物都包含在他的存在之中，因此，[上帝]包罗万象。他的本质存在于他的质点（sefiroth）之中，他本身就是一切，在他之外没有任何事物存在。” ^⁵他与伊本·阿拉比和穆拉·萨德拉的一元论非常接近。

In order to do justice to this new vision of God, we must understand that these myths were not intended to be taken literally. The Safed Kabbalists were aware that the imagery they used was very daring and constantly hedged around it with such expressions as “as it were” or “one might suppose.” But any talk about God was problematic, not least the biblical doctrine of the creation of the universe. The Kabbalists found this as difficult in their own way as had the Faylasufs. Both accepted the Platonic metaphor of emanation, which involves God with the world that eternally flows from him. The prophets had stressed God’s holiness and separation from the world, but The Zohar had suggested that the world of God’s sefiroth comprised the whole of reality. How could he be separate from the world if he was all in all? Moses ben Jacob Cordovero of Safed (1522–1570) saw the paradox clearly and attempted to deal with it. In his theology, God En Sof was no longer the incomprehensible Godhead but the thought of the world: he was one with all created things in their ideal Platonic state but separate from their flawed embodiment below: “Insofar as everything that exists is contained in his existence, [God] encompasses all existence,” he explained, “his substance is present in his sefiroth and He Himself is everything and nothing exists outside him.”⁵ He was very close to the monism of Ibn al-Arabi and Mulla Sadra.

但萨法德卡巴拉的英雄和圣人伊萨克·卢里亚（1534-1572）试图用有史以来关于上帝最惊人的理论之一，更充分地解释神圣超越性和内在性的悖论。大多数犹太神秘主义者对他们的神圣体验讳莫如深。这类灵性的一个矛盾之处在于，神秘主义者声称他们的体验是不可言喻的，却又随时准备将其记录下来。然而，卡巴拉学者对此保持警惕。卢里亚是最早的几位圣人之一，他凭借个人魅力吸引了众多追随者，传播他的神秘主义理念。他并非……他是一位作家，我们对他的卡巴拉体系的了解基于他的门徒海姆·维塔尔（1542-1620）在其著作《生命之树》（ Etz Hayim）中记录的对话，以及约瑟夫·伊本·塔布尔的著作，该书的手稿直到 1921 年才出版。

But Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the hero and saint of the Kabbalism of Safed, tried to explain the paradox of the divine transcendence and immanence more fully with one of the most astonishing ideas ever formulated about God. Most Jewish mystics were very reticent about their experience of the divine. It is one of the contradictions of this type of spirituality that mystics claim that their experiences are ineffable but are yet quite ready to write it all down. Kabbalists were wary of this, however. Luria was one of the first Zaddikim, or holy men, who attracted disciples to his brand of mysticism by his personal charisma. He was not a writer, and our knowledge of his Kabbalistic system is based on the conversations recorded by his disciples Hayim Vital (1542–1620) in his treatise Etz Hayim (The Tree of Life) and Joseph ibn Tabul, whose manuscript was not published until 1921.

卢里亚直面困扰一神论者数个世纪的问题：一位完美无限的上帝怎能创造出一个充满邪恶的有限世界？邪恶究竟从何而来？卢里亚通过想象在质点（sefiroth）显现之前发生的事情找到了答案，那时，无限之光（En Sof）在崇高的内省中转向自身。卢里亚教导说，为了给世界腾出空间，无限之光仿佛腾出了自身内部的一部分。在这种“收缩”或“退隐”（tsimtsum）的行为中，上帝创造了一个他自身不存在的地方，一个他可以通过自我启示和创造的同步过程来填充的空旷空间。这是一种大胆的尝试，旨在阐明无中生有的创造论这一晦涩难懂的教义：无限之光的第一个行为就是自我放逐，远离自身的一部分。他仿佛深入自身，并给自己设下了界限。这种观念与基督教三位一体中设想的原始虚己（kenosis）颇为相似，即上帝在自我表达的过程中将自身空化于圣子之中。对于十六世纪的卡巴拉学者而言，tsimtsum主要象征着流放，它构成了所有受造物的基础，并且是恩·索夫（En Sof）自身所经历的。

Luria confronted the question that had troubled monotheists for centuries: how could a perfect and infinite God have created a finite world riddled with evil? Where had evil come from? Luria found his answer by imagining what had happened before the emanation of the sefiroth, when En Sof had been turned in upon itself in sublime introspection. In order to make room for the world, Luria taught, En Sof had, as it were, vacated a region within himself. In this act of “shrinking” or “withdrawal” (tsimtsum), God had thus created a place where he was not, an empty space that he could fill by the simultaneous process of self-revelation and creation. It was a daring attempt to illustrate the difficult doctrine of creation out of nothing: the very first act of En Sof was a self-imposed exile from a part of himself. He had, as it were, descended more deeply into his own being and put a limit upon himself. It is an idea that is not dissimilar to the primordial kenosis that Christians have imagined in the Trinity, whereby God emptied himself into his Son in an act of self-expression. For sixteenth-century Kabbalists, tsimtsum was primarily a symbol of exile, which underlay the structure of all created existence and had been experienced by En Sof himself.

上帝退隐所造成的“空虚”被想象成一个圆，四周被“无形之源”（En Sof）所环绕。这就是《创世记》中提到的“无形荒芜” （tohu u-bohu） 。在“舍弃”（tsimtsum）之前，上帝各种不同的“能力”（后来演变为质点）和谐地融合在一起，彼此之间没有区别。特别是，上帝的“慈悲”（Hesed）和“严厉的审判”（Din）在上帝之内完美和谐地存在着。但在“舍弃”的过程中，“无形之源”将“严厉的审判”从祂的其他属性中分离出来，并将其放入祂所舍弃的空虚之中。因此，“舍弃”不仅仅是一种自我空虚的爱的行为，也可以被视为一种神圣的净化：上帝从祂的内在深处消除了祂的愤怒或审判（《佐哈尔》将其视为罪恶的根源）。因此，他最初的行为展现了他对自己冷酷无情的一面。既然迪恩（Din）已经脱离了赫塞德（Hesed）以及上帝的其他属性，它就具有潜在的破坏性。然而，恩索夫（En Sof）并没有完全放弃这片虚空。一道神圣之光的“细线”穿透了这个圆圈，形成了《佐哈尔》（Zohar）中所说的亚当·卡德蒙（Adam Kadmon），即原始人。

The “empty space” created by God’s withdrawal was conceived as a circle, which was surrounded on all sides by En Sof. This was tohu u-bohu, the formless waste mentioned in Genesis. Before the recoil of tsimtsum, all God’s various “powers” (later to become the sefiroth) mingled harmoniously together. They were not differentiated from one another. In particular, God’s Hesed (Mercy) and Din (Stern Judgment) existed within God in perfect harmony. But during the process of tsimtsum, En Sof separated Din from the rest of his attributes and thrust it into the empty space that he had abandoned. Thus tsimtsum was not simply an act of self-emptying love but could be seen as a sort of divine purge: God had eliminated his Wrath or Judgment (which The Zohar had seen as the root of evil) from his inmost being. His primal act, therefore, showed a harshness and ruthlessness toward himself. Now that Din was separate from Hesed and the rest of God’s attributes, it was potentially destructive. Yet En Sof did not abandon the empty space entirely. A “thin line” of the divine light penetrated this circle, which took the form of what The Zohar had called Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man.

然后，塞菲罗斯（Sefiroth）显现出来，尽管并非如人们所说的那样。在《佐哈尔》中有所记载。卢里亚教导说，生命之树的三个质点（sefiroth）形成于亚当·卡德蒙（Adam Kadmon）体内：最高的三个质点——王冠（Kether）、智慧（Hokhmah）和知识（Binah）——分别从他的“鼻子”、“耳朵”和“嘴巴”散发出来。但随后发生了一场灾难，卢里亚称之为“容器的破碎”（Shevirath Ha-Kelim）。质点需要被特殊的容器或“器皿”所容纳，以便彼此区分和分离，并防止它们再次融合为一体。这些“容器”或“管道”当然并非物质，而是由一种更浓稠的光构成，如同“外壳”（kelipot ）一般，承载着质点更纯净的光芒。当最高的三个质点从亚当·卡德蒙散发出来时，它们的容器运转完美。但当接下来的六个质点从他的“双眼”中涌出时，它们的容器不足以容纳神圣之光，最终破碎。结果，光芒四射。一部分光芒上升，回归神性，但一些神圣的“火花”坠入空旷的荒芜之地，被困于混沌之中。从此，万物不再各就各位。就连最高的三个质点也因这场灾难而坠入较低的领域。原有的和谐被破坏，神圣的火花迷失在无形的荒芜之地，被放逐出神性。

Then came the emanation of the sefiroth, though not as this is said to have occurred in The Zohar. Luria taught that the sefiroth had formed in Adam Kadmon: the three highest sefiroth—Kether (The Crown), Hokhmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Intelligence)—radiated from his “nose,” “ears” and “mouth,” respectively. But then a catastrophe occurred, which Luria called “the Breaking of the Vessels” (Shevirath Ha-Kelim). The sefiroth needed to be contained in special coverings or “vessels” to distinguish and separate them from one another and to prevent them from merging again into their former unity. These “vessels” or “pipes” were not material, of course, but were composed of a sort of thicker light that served as “shells” (kelipot) for the purer light of the sefiroth. When the three highest sefiroth had radiated from Adam Kadmon, their vessels had functioned perfectly. But when the next six sefiroth issued from his “eyes,” their vessels were not strong enough to contain the divine light and they smashed. Consequently the light was scattered. Some of it rose upward and returned to the Godhead, but some divine “sparks” fell into the empty waste and remained trapped in chaos. Thenceforth nothing was in its proper place. Even the three highest sefiroth had fallen to a lower sphere as a result of the catastrophe. The original harmony had been ruined and the divine sparks were lost in the formless waste of tohu u-bohu, in exile from the Godhead.

这个奇异的神话让人想起早期诺斯替教关于原始错位的传说。它表达了整个创造过程中蕴含的张力，这种张力更接近于当今科学家设想的大爆炸，而非《创世记》中描述的更为平和有序的序列。恩索夫从隐秘状态中显现并非易事：他只能通过某种试错的方式才能做到。在《塔木德》中，拉比们也有类似的观点。他们认为，上帝在创造这个世界之前，曾创造并毁灭了其他世界。但一切并非就此结束。一些卡巴拉学者将这种“破裂”（Shevirath ）比作诞生的突破或种子荚的破裂。毁灭仅仅是新创造的序曲。尽管一切都处于混乱之中，恩索夫仍将通过“修复”（Tikkun）或“重整”的过程，从这看似混乱的局面中带来新的生命。

This strange myth is reminiscent of the earlier Gnostic myths of a primordial dislocation. It expresses the tension involved in the whole creative process, which is far closer to the Big Bang envisaged by scientists today than the more peaceful, orderly sequence described by Genesis. It was not easy for En Sof to emerge from his hidden state: he could only do so—as it were—in a sort of trial and error. In the Talmud, the Rabbis had had a similar idea. They had said that God had made other worlds and had destroyed them before he created this one. But all was not lost. Some Kabbalists compared this “Breaking” (Shevirath) to the breakthrough of birth or the bursting of a seed pod. The destruction had simply been a prelude to a new creation. Although everything was in disarray, En Sof would bring new life out of this apparent chaos by means of the process of Tikkun or reintegration.

灾难过后，一道新的光芒从恩索夫（En Sof）发出，穿透了亚当·卡德蒙（Adam Kadmon）的“额头”。这一次，质点（sefiroth）被重新组合成新的形态：它们不再是上帝的概括性面向。每一个质点都变成了一张“面容”（parzuf），上帝的完整人格在其中得以展现，仿佛拥有各自独特的特征，这与三位一体的三个位格颇为相似。卢里亚试图找到一种新的方式来表达古老的卡巴拉教义。这是关于不可知的上帝以人格形式诞生的理念。在“修复”（Tikkun）的过程中，卢里亚运用人类人格的孕育、诞生和发展的象征意义，暗示上帝也经历了类似的演化。这其中的奥秘十分复杂，或许用图解形式解释最为恰当。在“修复”过程中，上帝通过将十个质点（ sefiroth ）重新组合成五个“面容”（parzufim ） ，恢复了秩序，具体步骤如下：

After the catastrophe, a new stream of light issued from En Sof and broke through the “forehead” of Adam Kadmon. This time the sefiroth were reorganized into new configurations: they were no longer to be generalized aspects of God. Each one became a “Countenance” (parzuf) in which the entire personality of God was revealed, with—as it were—distinctive features, in rather the same way as in the three personae of the Trinity. Luria was trying to find a new way of expressing the old Kabbalistic idea of the inscrutable God giving birth to himself as a person. In the process of Tikkun, Luria used the symbolism of the conception, birth and development of a human personality to suggest a similar evolution in God. It is complicated and perhaps best explained in diagrammatic form. In the reintegration of Tikkun, God restored order by regrouping the ten sefiroth into five “Countenances” (parzufim) in the following stages:

1. Kether（王冠），最高级别的质点，佐哈尔称之为“虚无”，变成了第一个质点，被称为“Arik” Anpin：宽容者。
2. Kether (The Crown), the highest sefirah, which The Zohar had called “Nothing,” becomes the first parzuf, called “Arik” Anpin: the Forebearing One.
3. Hokhmah（智慧）成为第二个parzuf，称为 Abba：父亲。
4. Hokhmah (Wisdom) becomes the second parzuf, called Abba: Father.
5. Binah（智慧）成为第三个parzuf，称为 Ima：母亲。
6. Binah (Intelligence) becomes the third parzuf, called Ima: Mother.
7. Din（审判）；Hesed（慈悲）；Rakhamim（怜悯）；Netsakh（耐心）；Hod（威严）；Yesod（根基）都成为第四个parzuf，称为Zeir Anpin：不耐烦者。他的配偶是：
8. Din (Judgment); Hesed (Mercy); Rakhamim (Compassion); Netsakh (Patience); Hod (Majesty); Yesod (Foundation) all become the fourth parzuf, called Zeir Anpin: the Impatient One. His consort is:
9. 最后一个质点，称为 Malkuth（王国）或 Shekinah：它变成了第五个parzuf，称为 Nuqrah de Zeir：Zeir 的女人。
10. The last sefirah, called Malkuth (Kingdom) or the Shekinah: it becomes the fifth parzuf, which is called Nuqrah de Zeir: Zeir’s Woman.

这种性象征手法大胆地描绘了生命之树（Sefiroth）的重聚，它将治愈器皿破碎时造成的裂痕，并恢复最初的和谐。两对“伴侣”——阿爸和伊玛，泽尔和努克拉——进行着交合（ziwwug），这种神性中男性和女性元素的结合象征着秩序的恢复。卡巴拉学者不断告诫读者不要字面理解。这是一种虚构的象征，旨在暗示一个无法用清晰、理性的语言描述的整合过程，并中和神身上过于强烈的男性形象。神秘主义者所设想的救赎并非依赖于弥赛亚降临之类的历史事件，而是神自身必须经历的过程。神最初的计划是让人类成为他的助手，共同救赎那些在器皿破碎时分散并陷入混乱的神圣火花。但亚当在伊甸园中犯了罪。如果他没有这样做，原本的和谐就会恢复，神圣的流放也会在第一个安息日结束。但亚当的堕落重演了器皿破碎的原始灾难。受造的秩序崩塌了，他灵魂中的神圣之光四散流淌，被囚禁在……物质破碎。因此，上帝制定了另一个计划。他拣选以色列作为他的盟友，共同争夺主权和统治权。尽管以色列如同神圣的火花本身，散落在残酷无情的流散之地，犹太人却肩负着特殊的使命。只要神圣的火花在物质中分离迷失，上帝就不完整。通过认真遵守律法和虔诚祈祷，每个犹太人都能帮助火花回归神圣的源头，从而救赎世界。在这种救赎的愿景中，上帝并非居高临下地俯视人类，而是如犹太人一直坚持的那样，实际上依赖于人类。犹太人拥有独特的特权，能够帮助重塑上帝，使他焕然一新。

The sexual symbolism is a bold attempt to depict the reunification of the sefiroth, which will heal the rupture that occurred when the vessels were broken and restore the original harmony. The two “couples”—Abba and Ima, Zeir and Nuqrah—engage in ziwwug (copulation), and this mating of the male and female elements within God symbolizes the restored order. The Kabbalists constantly warn their readers not to take this literally. It is a fiction designed to hint at a process of integration that cannot be described in clear, rational terms and to neutralize the overwhelmingly masculine imagery of God. The salvation envisaged by the mystics did not depend upon historical events like the coming of the Messiah but was a process that God himself must undergo. God’s first plan had been to make humanity his helpmate in the process of redeeming those divine sparks that had been scattered and trapped in chaos at the Breaking of the Vessels. But Adam had sinned in the Garden of Eden. Had he not done so, the original harmony would have been restored and the divine exile ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam’s fall repeated the primal catastrophe of the Breaking of the Vessels. The created order fell and the divine light in his soul was scattered abroad and imprisoned in broken matter. Consequently, God evolved yet another plan. He had chosen Israel to be his helpmate in the struggle for sovereignty and control. Even though Israel, like the divine sparks themselves, is scattered throughout the cruel and Godless realm of the diaspora, Jews have a special mission. As long as the divine sparks are separated and lost in matter, God is incomplete. By careful observance of Torah and the discipline of prayer, each Jew could help to restore the sparks to their divine source and so redeem the world. In this vision of salvation, God is not gazing down on humanity condescendingly but, as Jews had always insisted, is actually dependent upon mankind. Jews have the unique privilege of helping to re-form God and create him anew.

卢里亚赋予了舍金娜（Shekinah）流亡的原始意象新的意义。人们或许还记得，在《塔木德》中，拉比们认为舍金娜在圣殿被毁后自愿与犹太人一同流亡。《佐哈尔》将舍金娜等同于最后一个质点（sefirah），并将其视为神性的女性面向。在卢里亚的神话中，舍金娜与其他质点一同在器皿破碎时堕落。在修复（Tikkun）的第一阶段，她化身为努克拉（Nuqrah），并通过与泽尔（Zeir，即六个“中间”质点）结合，几乎重新融入了神圣世界。但当亚当犯罪后，舍金娜再次堕落，并被逐出神界。卢里亚极不可能接触到那些发展出非常相似神话的基督教诺斯替教派的著作。他自发地重述了古老的流亡与堕落神话，以契合十六世纪的悲剧境况。在圣经时期，犹太人正逐步形成一神论，因此他们拒绝接受关于神圣交合和流亡女神的故事。这些故事与异教和偶像崇拜的关联，理应令塞法迪犹太人感到反感。然而，卢里亚的神话却受到了从波斯到英国、从德国到波兰、从意大利到北非、从荷兰到也门等地犹太人的热烈欢迎；经过犹太语境的重新诠释，它触动了人们内心深处被压抑的情感，在绝望中带来了新的希望。它使犹太人相信，尽管他们中的许多人生活在极其恶劣的环境中，但一切终究都有其意义和价值。

Luria gave a new meaning to the original image of the exile of the Shekinah. It will be recalled that in the Talmud, the Rabbis had seen the Shekinah voluntarily going into exile with the Jews after the destruction of the Temple. The Zohar had identified the Shekinah with the last sefirah and made it the female aspect of divinity. In Luria’s myth, the Shekinah fell with the other sefiroth when the Vessels were shattered. In the first stage of Tikkun, she had become Nuqrah and by mating with Zeir (the six “Middle” sefiroth) had almost been reintegrated into the divine world. But when Adam sinned, the Shekinah fell once more and went into exile from the rest of the Godhead. Luria was most unlikely to have encountered the writings of those Christian Gnostics who had developed a very similar mythology. He had spontaneously reproduced the old myths of exile and fall to meet the tragic conditions of the sixteenth century. Tales of divine copulation and the exiled goddess had been rejected by the Jews during the biblical period, when they were evolving their doctrine of the One God. Their connection with paganism and idolatry should logically have revolted the Sephardim. Instead, Luria’s mythology was embraced eagerly by Jews from Persia to England, Germany to Poland, Italy to North Africa, Holland to Yemen; recast in Jewish terms, it was able to touch a buried chord and give new hope in the midst of despair. It enabled the Jews to believe that despite the appalling circumstances in which so many of them lived, there was an ultimate meaning and significance.

犹太人可以结束神圣临在（Shekinah）的流亡。通过遵守诫命（mitzvot），他们可以重建他们的上帝。将这个神话与路德和加尔文几乎在同一时期于欧洲创立的新教神学进行比较，会很有意思。这两位新教改革家都宣扬上帝的绝对主权：正如我们将看到的，在他们的神学中，男女绝对无法为自身的救赎做出任何贡献。然而，卢里亚却宣扬一种行为论：上帝他们需要人类，若没有他们的祈祷和善行，他们的生命将是不完整的。尽管犹太人在欧洲遭遇了悲剧，但他们对人性的看法却比新教徒更加乐观。卢里亚以冥想的视角看待“修复”（Tikkun）的使命。当欧洲的基督徒——无论是天主教徒还是新教徒——都在不断构建教条时，卢里亚复兴了亚伯拉罕·阿布拉菲亚的神秘主义方法，帮助犹太人超越这种理性活动，培养一种更具直觉性的觉知。在阿布拉菲亚的灵修中，重新排列神圣名字的字母，提醒这位卡巴拉学者，“上帝”的含义无法用人类语言充分表达。在卢里亚的神话体系中，这也象征着神圣的重构和重塑。海伊姆·维塔尔描述了卢里亚的修行方式所带来的巨大情感冲击：通过与日常生活的常规经验隔绝——在众人沉睡时守夜，在众人进食时禁食，以及暂时隐居——卡巴拉学者得以专注于那些与日常语言毫无关联的奇异“词语”。他感觉自己置身于另一个世界，会不由自主地颤抖，仿佛被某种外在的力量所控制。

The Jews could end the exile of the Shekinah. By the observance of the mitzvot, they could rebuild their God again. It is interesting to compare this myth with the Protestant theology that Luther and Calvin were creating in Europe at about the same time. The Protestant reformers both preached the absolute sovereignty of God: in their theology, as we shall see, there is absolutely nothing that men and women could contribute to their own salvation. Luria, however, preached a doctrine of works: God needed human beings and would remain somehow incomplete without their prayer and good deeds. Despite the tragedy that had befallen the Jewish people in Europe, they were able to be more optimistic about humanity than the Protestants. Luria saw the mission of Tikkun in contemplative terms. Where the Christians of Europe—Catholic and Protestant alike—were formulating more and more dogmas, Luria revived the mystical techniques of Abraham Abulafia to help Jews transcend this kind of intellectual activity and to cultivate a more intuitive awareness. Rearranging the letters of the Divine Name, in Abulafia’s spirituality, had reminded the Kabbalist that the meaning of “God” could not adequately be conveyed by human language. In Luria’s mythology, it also symbolized the restructuring and re-formation of the divine. Hayyim Vital described the immensely emotional effect of Luria’s disciplines: by separating himself from his normal, everyday experience—by keeping vigil when everybody else was asleep, fasting when others were eating, withdrawing into seclusion for a while—a Kabbalist could concentrate on the strange “words” that bore no relation to ordinary speech. He felt that he was in another world, would find himself shaking and trembling as though possessed by a force outside himself.

但其中并无焦虑。卢里亚坚持认为，卡巴拉学者在开始灵修之前，必须先获得内心的平静。幸福和喜悦至关重要：不应有捶胸顿足或懊悔不已，也不应因自己的表现而感到内疚或焦虑。维塔尔坚称，神圣的舍金纳（Shekinah）无法栖身于悲伤和痛苦之中——这一观点源于《塔木德》。悲伤源于世间的邪恶力量，而幸福则使卡巴拉学者能够爱上帝并与他紧密相连。卡巴拉学者的心中不应有任何对任何人的愤怒或攻击——即使是对非犹太人（goyim）。卢里亚将愤怒等同于偶像崇拜，因为愤怒之人会被“异神”所附身。批评卢里亚的神秘主义并非难事。正如格尔松·肖勒姆所指出的， 《佐哈尔》中强烈的上帝“恩索夫”（En Sof）的奥秘，往往在“齐姆齐姆”（tsimtsum）、“器皿破碎”和“蒂昆”（Tikkun ）等戏剧性事件中被掩盖。 ⁶在下一章中，我们将看到，它促成了犹太历史上一个灾难性的、令人尴尬的事件。然而，卢里亚的上帝观却能够帮助犹太人在当时培养一种喜乐和仁慈的精神，以及对人性的积极看法。在那个时期，犹太人的罪恶感和愤怒本可能使许多人陷入绝望，甚至彻底丧失对生活的信仰。

But there was no anxiety. Luria insisted that before he began his spiritual exercises, the Kabbalist must achieve peace of mind. Happiness and joy were essential: there was to be no breast-beating or remorse, no guilt or anxiety about one’s performance. Vital insisted that the Shekinah cannot live in a place of sorrow and pain—an idea that we have seen to be rooted in the Talmud. Sadness springs from the forces of evil in the world, whereas happiness enables the Kabbalist to love God and cleave to him. There should be no anger or aggression in the Kabbalist’s heart for anybody whatsoever—even the goyim. Luria identified anger with idolatry, since an angry person is possessed by a “strange god.” It is easy to criticize Lurianic mysticism. As Gershom Scholem points out, the mystery of God En Sof, which was so strong in The Zohar, tends to get lost in the drama of tsimtsum, the Breaking of the Vessels and Tikkun.⁶ In the next chapter, we shall see that it contributed to a disastrous and embarrassing episode in Jewish history. Yet Luria’s conception of God was able to help Jews to cultivate a spirit of joy and kindness, together with a positive view of humanity at a time when the guilt and anger of the Jews could have caused many to despair and to lose faith in life altogether.

欧洲的基督徒无法产生如此积极的精神境界。他们也经历了无法估量的历史灾难。经院哲学家的宗教哲学抚慰了人们的焦虑。1348年的黑死病、1453年君士坦丁堡的陷落，以及阿维尼翁囚禁（1334-1342）和大分裂（1378-1417）等教会丑闻，都鲜明地凸显了人类境况的无力，并使教会声名狼藉。人类似乎没有上帝的帮助就无法摆脱可怕的困境。因此，在十四和十五世纪，像牛津的邓斯·司各脱（1265-1308）（不要与埃里根纳的邓斯·司各脱混淆）和法国神学家让·德·热尔松（1363-1429）这样的神学家都强调上帝的主权，认为上帝像绝对统治者一样严格地掌控着人类事务。男女对自身的救赎毫无贡献；善行本身并无功德，只是因为上帝慈悲地判定它们是善的。但在这些世纪里，人们的关注点也发生了转变。格尔森本人就是一位神秘主义者，他认为与其“基于真信仰的理性去寻求理解上帝的本质”，不如“首先坚持对上帝的爱，而不必进行高深的探究”。^正如我们所见，十四世纪欧洲神秘主义兴起，人们开始意识到，理性不足以解释他们称之为“上帝”的奥秘。正如托马斯·阿·坎皮斯在《效法基督》中所说：

The Christians of Europe were not able to produce such a positive spirituality. They too had endured historical disasters that could not be assuaged by the philosophical religion of the scholastics. The Black Death of 1348, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the ecclesiastical scandals of the Avignon Captivity (1334–42) and the Great Schism (1378–1417) had thrown the impotence of the human condition into vivid relief and brought the Church into disrepute. Humanity seemed unable to extricate itself from its fearful predicament without God’s help. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, therefore, theologians like Duns Scotus of Oxford (1265–1308)—not to be confused with Duns Scotus Erigena—and the French theologian Jean de Gerson (1363–1429) both emphasized the sovereignty of God, who controlled human affairs as stringently as an absolute ruler. Men and women could contribute nothing to their salvation; good deeds were not meritorious in themselves but only because God had graciously decreed that they were good. But during these centuries, there was also a shift in emphasis. Gerson himself was a mystic, who believed that it was better to “hold primarily to the love of God without lofty enquiry” rather than to “seek through reasons based on the true faith, to understand the nature of God.”⁷ There had been an upsurge of mysticism in Europe during the fourteenth century, as we have seen, and the people were beginning to appreciate that reason was inadequate to explain the mystery they called “God.” As Thomas à Kempis said in The Imitation of Christ:

《效法基督》以其略显阴郁的宗教氛围，成为西方最受欢迎的灵修经典之一。在这些世纪里，虔诚的信仰越来越以耶稣其人为中心。苦路十四站的祈祷尤其细致地描绘了耶稣的肉体痛苦和悲伤。一些十四世纪匿名作者的冥想录告诉读者，如果他在清晨醒来，在默想了最后的晚餐和客西马尼园的痛苦之后，双眼仍应因泪水而泛红。他应该立即开始默想耶稣的审判，并逐小时地跟随他走向髑髅地。读者被鼓励想象自己恳求当局饶恕基督的性命，坐在他身旁，亲吻他被锁链束缚的手脚。9^在这令人沮丧的仪式中，对复活的着墨不多，重点反而放在耶稣脆弱的人性上。许多描述都充满了强烈的感情，以及在现代读者看来近乎病态的好奇心。就连瑞典的布里吉特和诺里奇的朱利安这样的伟大神秘主义者，也对耶稣的身体状况进行了耸人听闻的详细描述：

The Imitation of Christ, with its rather dour, gloomy religiosity, became one of the most popular of all Western spiritual classics. During these centuries, piety centered increasingly on Jesus the man. The practice of making the stations of the cross dwelt in particular detail on Jesus’ physical pain and sorrow. Some fourteenth-century meditations written by an anonymous author tell the reader that when he wakes up in the morning after spending most of the night meditating on the Last Supper and the Agony in the Garden, his eyes should still be red with weeping. Immediately he should begin to contemplate Jesus’ trial and follow his progress to Calvary, hour by hour. The reader is urged to imagine himself pleading with the authorities to save Christ’s life, to sit beside him in prison and to kiss his chained hands and feet.⁹ In this dismal program, there is little emphasis on the Resurrection. Instead the stress is on the vulnerable humanity of Jesus. A violence of emotion and what strikes the modern reader as morbid curiosity characterizes many of these descriptions. Even the great mystics Bridget of Sweden or Julian of Norwich speculate in lurid detail about Jesus’ physical state:

这不禁让人想起十四世纪德国的十字架，其人物形象怪诞扭曲，鲜血喷涌而出，而这种风格在马蒂亚斯·格吕内瓦尔德（1480-1528）的作品中达到了顶峰。朱利安对上帝的本质有着深刻的洞察：她将三位一体描绘成存在于灵魂之中，而非“外在”的现实，这才是真正的神秘主义者。然而，西方对人性化的基督的关注似乎过于强大，难以抗拒。在十四、十五世纪，欧洲的男男女女越来越多地将他人而非上帝作为他们精神生活的中心。中世纪对圣母玛利亚和圣徒的崇拜与对人性化的耶稣日益增长的虔诚交织在一起。对圣物和圣地的热情也使西方基督徒偏离了真正重要的事。人们似乎把注意力放在了除上帝之外的任何事情上。

This reminds us of the German crucifixes of the fourteenth century with their grotesquely twisted figures and gushing blood, which, of course, reached a climax in the work of Matthias Grünewald (1480–1528). Julian was capable of great insight into the nature of God: she depicts the Trinity living within the soul and not as an external reality “out there,” like a true mystic. But the strength of Western concentration on the human Christ seemed too powerful to resist. Increasingly, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, men and women in Europe were making other human beings the center of their spiritual life rather than God. The medieval cult of Mary and of the saints increased alongside the growing devotion to Jesus the man. Enthusiasm for relics and holy places also distracted Western Christians from the one thing necessary. People seemed to be concentrating on anything but God.

西方精神的阴暗面甚至在文艺复兴时期就已显露。文艺复兴时期的哲学家和人文主义者对中世纪的许多虔诚做法持批判态度。他们极其厌恶经院哲学家，认为他们晦涩难懂的思辨使上帝听起来既陌生又乏味。相反，他们希望回归信仰的源头，尤其是圣奥古斯丁。中世纪的人们尊崇奥古斯丁为神学家，但人文主义者重新发现了《忏悔录》，并将他视为一位在个人探索中寻求真理的普通人。他们认为，基督教并非一套教义，而是一种体验。洛伦佐·瓦拉（1407-1457）强调，将神圣教条与“辩证法的技巧”和“形而上学的诡辩”混为一谈是徒劳的： ¹¹这些“徒劳之举”曾被圣保罗谴责过。弗朗切斯科·彼特拉克（1304-1374）曾提出，“神学实际上是诗歌，是关于上帝的诗歌”，其有效性并非在于它“证明”了什么，而在于它能触动人心。 ¹²人文主义者重新发现了人性的尊严，但这并没有使他们否定上帝：相反，作为那个时代的真正人物，他们强调了道成肉身的上帝的人性。然而，旧有的不安全感依然存在。文艺复兴时期的人们深刻意识到我们知识的脆弱性，也能理解奥古斯丁对罪恶的敏锐感知。正如彼特拉克所说：

The dark side of the Western spirit was even manifest during the Renaissance. The philosophers and humanists of the Renaissance were highly critical of much medieval piety. They disliked the scholastics intensely, feeling that their abstruse speculations made God sound alien and boring. Instead, they wanted to return to the sources of the faith, particularly to St. Augustine. The medievals had revered Augustine as a theologian, but the humanists rediscovered the Confessions and saw him as a fellow man on a personal quest. Christianity, they argued, was not a body of doctrines but an experience. Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) stressed the futility of mixing sacred dogma with “tricks of dialectics” and “metaphysical quibbles”:¹¹ these “futilities” had been condemned by St. Paul himself. Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) had suggested that “theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it penetrated the heart.¹² The humanists had rediscovered the dignity of humanity, but this did not cause them to reject God: instead, as true men of their age, they stressed the humanity of God who had become man. But the old insecurities remained. The Renaissance men were deeply aware of the fragility of our knowledge and could also sympathize with Augustine’s acute sense of sin. As Petrarch said:

因此，人与神之间存在着巨大的距离：科卢乔·萨卢塔蒂（1331-1406）和莱昂纳多·布鲁尼（1369-1444）都认为神是完全超越的，是人类心灵无法企及的。

Hence there was a vast distance between man and God: Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) both saw God as utterly transcendent and inaccessible to the human mind.

然而，德国哲学家兼教会人士尼古拉斯·库萨（1401-1464）对我们理解上帝的能力更有信心。他对新兴科学非常感兴趣，认为它能帮助我们理解三位一体的奥秘。例如，数学只处理纯粹的抽象概念，却能提供其他学科无法提供的确定性。因此，数学中“最大值”和“最小值”的概念表面上是对立的，但实际上在逻辑上可以被视为同一的。这种“对立面的重合”蕴含着上帝的理念：“最大值”的概念包罗万象；它蕴含着统一性和必然性的概念，而这些概念直接指向上帝。此外，最大值线并非三角形、圆形或球体，而是三者的组合：对立面的统一性也体现了三位一体。然而，尼古拉斯的巧妙论证几乎没有宗教意义。它似乎将上帝的概念简化为一个逻辑难题。但他坚信“上帝包容一切，甚至包括矛盾” ^¹⁴，这与希腊东正教的观点——所有真正的神学都必须是悖论式的——非常接近。尼古拉斯以灵性导师而非哲学家和数学家的身份写作时，他意识到基督徒在寻求接近上帝时必须“放下一切”，甚至“超越理智”，超越一切感官和理性。上帝的面容将永远笼罩在“神秘而隐秘的沉默” ^{¹⁵之中。}

Yet the German philosopher and churchman Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) was more confident about our ability to understand God. He was extremely interested in the new science, which he thought could help us to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity. Mathematics, for example, which dealt only with pure abstractions, could supply a certainty that was impossible in other disciplines. Thus the mathematical idea of “the maximum” and “the minimum” were apparently opposites but in fact could logically be seen as identical. This “coincidence of opposites” contained the idea of God: the idea of “the maximum” includes everything; it implies notions of unity and necessity which point directly to God. Further, the maximum line was not a triangle, a circle or a sphere, but all three combined: the unity of opposites was also a Trinity. Yet Nicholas’s clever demonstration has little religious meaning. It seems to reduce the idea of God to a logical conundrum. But his conviction that “God embraces everything, even contradictions”¹⁴ was close to the Greek Orthodox perception that all true theology must be paradoxical. When he was writing as a spiritual teacher, rather than as a philosopher and mathematician, Nicholas was aware that the Christian must “leave everything behind” when he sought to approach God, and “even transcend one’s intellect” going beyond all sense and reason. The face of God will remain shrouded in “a secret and mystic silence.”¹⁵

文艺复兴时期的新见解无法解决更深层次的恐惧。如同上帝一般，它超越了理性的范畴。尼古拉斯去世后不久，一种极其可怕的恐惧症在他的故乡德国爆发，并蔓延至整个北欧。1484年，教皇英诺森八世颁布了《至高渴望》（Summa Desiderantes ）教谕，标志着席卷欧洲的大规模猎巫狂潮的开始。这场狂潮在十六、十七世纪断断续续地席卷欧洲，新教徒和天主教徒都深受其害。它揭露了西方精神的阴暗面。在这场骇人听闻的迫害中，成千上万的男女遭受酷刑，最终被迫承认令人发指的罪行。他们声称自己曾与恶魔交媾，飞越数百英里参加淫乱的弥撒，在弥撒中，人们崇拜的是撒旦而非上帝。如今我们知道，根本没有女巫，这种狂热代表了一种巨大的集体幻想，这种幻想既存在于博学的宗教裁判官之中，也存在于许多受害者之中。这些人梦见了这些事情，并轻易地被说服，相信它们真的发生过。这种幻想与反犹主义和根深蒂固的性恐惧有关。撒旦成了至善至强的上帝的影子。这种情况在其他宗教中从未出现过。例如，《古兰经》明确指出，撒旦在末日审判时将被宽恕。一些苏菲派人士声称，撒旦堕落是因为他爱上帝胜过爱其他天使。上帝在创世之日命令他向亚当下拜，但撒旦拒绝了，因为他认为这种敬拜只能献给上帝。然而，在西方，撒旦却成了无法控制的邪恶化身。他越来越被描绘成一个体型庞大、性欲旺盛、生殖器巨大的野兽。正如诺曼·科恩在其著作《欧洲的内在恶魔》中所指出的，这种撒旦形象不仅仅是人们内心深处恐惧和焦虑的投射。猎巫狂潮也代表着一种无意识却又强烈的反抗，反抗着压迫性的宗教和看似冷酷无情的上帝。在酷刑室里，宗教裁判官和“女巫”共同创造了一种颠覆基督教的幻想。“黑弥撒”变成了一种令人毛骨悚然却又变态地令人满足的仪式，崇拜的不是上帝，而是一个看起来严厉而可怕到难以接近的神。 ¹⁶

The new insights of the Renaissance could not address deeper fears that, like God, lay beyond the reach of reason. Not long after Nicholas’s death, a particularly noxious phobia erupted in his native Germany and spread throughout northern Europe. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII published the Bull Summa Desiderantes, which marked the beginning of the great witch craze that raged sporadically throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, afflicting Protestant and Catholic communities equally. It revealed the dark underside of the Western spirit. During this hideous persecution, thousands of men and women were cruelly tortured until they confessed to astonishing crimes. They said that they had had sexual intercourse with demons, had flown hundreds of miles through the air to take part in orgies where Satan was worshipped instead of God in an obscene Mass. We now know that there were no witches but that the craze represented a vast collective fantasy, shared by the learned Inquisitors and many of their victims, who had dreamed these things and were easily persuaded that they actually happened. The fantasy was linked with anti-Semitism and a deep sexual fear. Satan had emerged as the shadow of an impossibly good and powerful God. This had not happened in the other God-religions. The Koran, for example, makes it clear that Satan will be forgiven on the Last Day. Some of the Sufis claimed that he had fallen from grace because he had loved God more than any of the other angels. God had commanded him to bow down before Adam on the day of creation, but Satan had refused because he believed that such obeisance should be offered to God alone. In the West, however, Satan became a figure of ungovernable evil. He was increasingly represented as a vast animal with a priapic sexual appetite and huge genitals. As Norman Cohn has suggested in his book Europe’s Inner Demons, this portrait of Satan was not only a projection of buried fear and anxiety. The witch craze also represented an unconscious but compulsive revolt against a repressive religion and an apparently inexorable God. In their torture chambers, Inquisitors and “witches” together created a fantasy which was an inversion of Christianity. The Black Mass became a horrifying but perversely satisfying ceremony that worshipped the Devil instead of a God who seemed harsh and too frightening to deal with.¹⁶

马丁·路德（1483-1546）坚信巫术的存在，并将基督徒的生活视为与撒旦的斗争。宗教改革可以被视为试图消除这种焦虑的一种尝试，尽管大多数改革者并没有提出任何新的上帝观。当然，将十六世纪欧洲发生的巨大宗教变革周期统称为“宗教改革”未免过于简单。这个词本身就暗示着……这场运动比实际情况更加深思熟虑、更加统一。各种改革者——无论是天主教徒还是新教徒——都在试图阐明一种新的宗教意识，这种意识强烈，但尚未被概念化或有意识地思考过。我们并不确切知道“宗教改革”发生的原因：如今，学者们告诫我们不要轻信旧教科书上的记载。这些变革并非完全如人们通常认为的那样，是由于教会的腐败，也并非是由于宗教热情的衰落。事实上，当时欧洲似乎存在一种宗教热情，促使人们开始批判他们以前习以为常的弊端。改革者的思想实际上都源于中世纪的天主教神学。民族主义的兴起以及德国和瑞士城市的崛起也发挥了作用，十六世纪信徒们新的虔诚和神学意识的觉醒同样功不可没。此外，欧洲个人主义的抬头也必然会导致对现有宗教态度的彻底反思。欧洲人不再以外在的、集体的方式表达信仰，而是开始探索宗教更深层次的内在意义。所有这些因素共同促成了西方走向现代化的痛苦且往往伴随着暴力的变革。

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a firm believer in witchcraft and saw the Christian life as a battle against Satan. The Reformation can be seen as an attempt to address this anxiety even though most of the Reformers did not promote any new conception of God. It is, of course, simplistic to call the immense cycle of religious change that took place in Europe during the sixteenth century “the Reformation.” The term suggests a more deliberate and unified movement than actually occurred. The various Reformers—Catholic as well as Protestant—were all trying to articulate a new religious awareness that was strongly felt but had not been conceptualized or consciously thought out. We do not know exactly why “the Reformation” happened: today scholars warn us against the old textbook accounts. The changes were not wholly due to the corruption of the Church, as is often supposed, nor to a decline in religious fervor. Indeed, there seems to have been a religious enthusiasm in Europe which led people to criticize abuses which they had previously taken for granted. The actual ideas of the Reformers all sprang from medieval, Catholic theologies. The rise of nationalism and of the cities in Germany and Switzerland also played a part, as did the new piety and theological awareness of the laity during the sixteenth century. There was also a heightened sense of individualism in Europe, and this always entailed a radical revision of current religious attitudes. Instead of expressing their faith in external, collective ways, the people of Europe were beginning to explore the more interior consequences of religion. All these factors contributed to the painful and frequently violent changes that propelled the West toward modernity.

在皈依基督教之前，路德几乎已经绝望地认为他不可能取悦他已经开始憎恨的上帝：

Before his conversion, Luther had almost despaired of the possibility of pleasing a God he had come to hate:

如今许多基督徒——无论是新教徒还是天主教徒——都会认同这种综合症，而宗教改革也未能彻底根除它。路德眼中的上帝以愤怒为特征。没有一位圣徒、先知或诗篇作者能够承受这种神圣的愤怒。仅仅“尽力而为”是无济于事的。因为上帝是永恒全能的，“他对自满的罪人的愤怒也是无法估量、无穷无尽的。” ¹⁸他的旨意深不可测。遵守律法上帝或宗教规章都无法拯救我们。事实上，律法只会带来控诉和恐惧，因为它让我们看到了自身的不足。律法非但没有带来希望的信息，反而揭示了“上帝的愤怒、罪恶、死亡以及在上帝眼中的永罚”。 ¹⁹路德的个人突破源于他阐述的称义论。人无法自救。上帝提供了“称义”所需的一切，即恢复罪人与上帝之间的关系。上帝是主动的，而人只是被动的。我们的“善行”和对律法的遵守并非称义的原因，而仅仅是结果。我们之所以能够遵守宗教的戒律，仅仅是因为上帝拯救了我们。这正是圣保罗所说的“因信称义”的含义。路德的理论并非什么新鲜事：它自十四世纪初以来就在欧洲流传。但一旦路德领悟并接受了这一理论，他便感到自己的焦虑烟消云散。随之而来的启示“让我感觉自己仿佛获得了新生，仿佛穿过敞开的大门进入了天堂。” ²⁰

Many Christians today—Protestant as well as Catholic—will recognize this syndrome, which the Reformation could not entirely abolish. Luther’s God was characterized by his wrath. None of the saints, prophets or psalmists had been able to endure this divine anger. It was no good simply trying “to do one’s best.” Because God was eternal and omnipotent, “his fury or wrath toward self-satisfied sinners is also immeasurable and infinite.”¹⁸ His will was past finding out. Observance of the Law of God or the rules of a religious order could not save us. Indeed, the Law could only bring accusation and terror, because it showed us the measure of our inadequacy. Instead of bringing a message of hope, the Law revealed “the wrath of God, sin, death and damnation in the sight of God.”¹⁹ Luther’s personal breakthrough came about when he formulated his doctrine of justification. Man could not save himself. God provides everything necessary for “justification,” the restoration of a relationship between the sinner and God. God is active and humans only passive. Our “good works” and observance of the Law are not the cause of our justification but only the result. We are able to observe the precepts of religion simply because God has saved us. This was what St. Paul had meant by the phrase “justification by faith.” There was nothing new about Luther’s theory: it had been current in Europe since the early fourteenth century. But once Luther had grasped it and made it his own, he felt his anxieties fall away. The revelation that ensued “made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had entered through open gates into paradise itself.”²⁰

然而，他对人性依然抱有极度悲观的态度。到了1520年，他发展出了自己所谓的“十字架神学”。他借用了圣保罗的话，圣保罗曾告诉他在哥林多教会的信徒，基督的十字架表明“神的愚拙总比人的智慧，神的软弱总比人的力量强”。 ²¹神称那些按照纯粹人的标准只能被视为罪人的“罪人”为义。在世人眼中看似软弱的地方，却彰显了神的力量。卢里亚教导他的卡巴拉信徒，神只能在喜乐和宁静中找到，而路德则声称“神只能在苦难和十字架中找到”。²²基于此，他展开了对经院哲学的论战，将虚假的神学家与真正的神学家区分开来。虚假的神学家炫耀人的聪明才智，“把上帝不可见的事物视作清晰可辨之物”，而真正的神学家则“通过苦难和十字架领悟上帝可见和显明的事物”。23^三位一体和道成肉身的教义，在教父们的阐述方式上似乎值得怀疑；它们的复杂性暗示着虚假的“荣耀神学”。24^然而，路德始终忠于尼西亚、以弗所和迦克墩的正统教义。事实上，他的称义理论正是建立在基督的神性和三位一体的地位之上。这些传统的上帝教义深深植根于基督徒的信仰体验之中，以至于路德和加尔文都难以质疑，但路德拒绝了虚假神学家晦涩难懂的论述。“这有什么关系呢？”“对我来说呢？”面对复杂的基督论教义，他问道：他只需要知道基督是他的救赎主^。25

Yet he remained extremely pessimistic about human nature. By the year 1520 he had developed what he called his Theology of the Cross. He had taken the phrase from St. Paul, who had told his Corinthian converts that the cross of Christ had shown that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”²¹ God justified “sinners” who, by purely human standards, could only be regarded as worthy of punishment. God’s strength was revealed in what was weakness in the eyes of men. Where Luria had taught his Kabbalists that God could only be found in joy and tranquillity, Luther claimed that “God can be found only in suffering and the Cross.”²² From this position, he developed a polemic against scholasticism, distinguishing the false theologian, who makes a display of human cleverness and “looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible,” from the true theologian “who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God through suffering and the Cross.”²³ The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation seemed suspect in the way they had been formulated by the Fathers of the Church; their complexity suggested the false “theology of glory.”²⁴ Yet Luther remained true to the orthodoxy of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon. Indeed, his theory of justification depended upon the divinity of Christ and his Trinitarian status. These traditional doctrines of God were too deeply embedded in the Christian experience for either Luther or Calvin to question, but Luther rejected the abstruse formulations of the false theologians. “What does it matter to me?” he asked, when confronted with the complex Christological doctrines: all he needed to know was that Christ was his redeemer.²⁵

路德甚至怀疑证明上帝存在的可能性。唯一能通过逻辑论证（例如托马斯·阿奎那所使用的论证）推导出的“上帝”，是异教哲学家们的上帝。当路德声称我们因“信”而称义时，他指的并非接受关于上帝的正确观念。“信仰不需要信息、知识和确定性，”他在一次布道中说道，“而是自由地臣服，并满怀喜乐地信赖他那未曾感受、未曾尝试、也未知的良善。” ²⁶他预见了帕斯卡和克尔凯郭尔对信仰问题的解答。信仰并非意味着认同信条的命题，也并非正统观点所理解的“相信”。相反，信仰是在黑暗中迈向一个必须凭着信任才能接受的现实。它是一种“既有知识又有黑暗，什么也看不见。” ²⁷他坚持认为，上帝严禁对他的本质进行任何思辨性的讨论。试图仅凭理性与神沟通可能很危险，甚至会导致绝望，因为我们最终只会发现神的权能、智慧和公义，而这只会令罪人感到畏惧。基督徒不应进行理性主义式的上帝论辩，而应领会圣经所启示的真理，并将其内化为己用。路德在其《小问答》中所作的信条中阐明了如何做到这一点：

Luther even doubted the possibility of proving the existence of God. The only “God” who could be deduced by logical arguments, such as those used by Thomas Aquinas, was the God of the pagan philosophers. When Luther claimed that we were justified by “faith,” he did not mean the adoption of the right ideas about God. “Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty,” he preached in one of his sermons, “but a free surrender and a joyful bet on his unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.”²⁶ He had anticipated the solutions of Pascal and Kierkegaard to the problem of faith. Faith did not mean assent to the propositions of a creed and it was not “belief” in orthodox opinion. Instead, faith was a leap in the dark toward a reality that had to be taken on trust. It was “a sort of knowledge and darkness that can see nothing.”²⁷ God, he insisted, strictly forbade speculative discussion of his nature. To attempt to reach him by means of reason alone could be dangerous and lead to despair, since all that we would discover were the power, wisdom and justice of God, which could only intimidate convicted sinners. Instead of engaging in rationalistic discussion of God, the Christian should appropriate the revealed truths of scripture and make them his own. Luther showed how this should be done in the creed he composed in his Small Catechism:

路德曾接受过经院神学的训练，但他后来回归了更为简朴的信仰形式，并对十四世纪枯燥乏味的神学感到反感，因为这些神学丝毫无法平息他的恐惧。然而，他自己有时也会显得晦涩难懂，例如，当他试图解释我们究竟是如何获得称义时。路德的偶像奥古斯丁教导说，赐予罪人的义并非来自他自身，而是来自上帝。路德对此做出了微妙的诠释。奥古斯丁认为，这种神圣的义成为了我们的一部分；而路德则坚持认为，它仍然存在于罪人之外，而是……上帝视之如同我们自己的。讽刺的是，宗教改革反而导致了教义上的更大混乱，以及各种新教义的涌现，这些新教义如同各个教派的旗帜一样，本身就如同它们试图取代的某些教派一样，既空洞又脆弱。

Luther had been trained in scholastic theology but had reverted to simpler forms of faith and had reacted against the arid theology of the fourteenth century, which could do nothing to calm his fears. Yet he himself could be abstruse when, for example, he tried to explain exactly how we became justified. Augustine, Luther’s hero, had taught that the righteousness bestowed upon the sinner was not his own but God’s. Luther gave this a subtle twist. Augustine had said that this divine righteousness became a part of us; Luther insisted that it remained outside the sinner but that God regarded it as though it were our own. Ironically, the Reformation would lead to greater doctrinal confusion and to the proliferation of new doctrines as the banners of the various sects which were just as rarefied and tenuous as some of those they sought to replace.

路德声称，当他阐述因信称义的教义时，他如同重生一般，但事实上，他的焦虑似乎并未完全消除。他依然是一个心神不宁、愤怒且暴力的人。所有主要的宗教传统都认为，检验任何灵性修为的试金石在于它融入日常生活的程度。正如佛陀所说，证悟之后，人应当“回归世俗”，对一切众生慈悲为怀。平和、宁静和慈爱是所有真正宗教洞见的标志。然而，路德却是一个狂热的反犹主义者、厌女者，他对性充满厌恶和恐惧，并认为所有反叛的农民都应该被处死。他对愤怒之神的想象使他内心充满愤怒，有人认为，他好战的性格对宗教改革造成了极大的损害。在他早期的宗教改革生涯中，他的许多思想都被正统天主教徒所接受，这些思想本可以给教会带来新的活力，但路德激进的策略却使这些思想受​​到了不必要的怀疑^。29

Luther claimed that he had been reborn when he had formulated his doctrine of justification, but in fact it does not seem as though all his anxieties had been allayed. He remained a disturbed, angry and violent man. All the major religious traditions claim that the acid test of any spirituality is the degree to which it has been integrated into daily life. As the Buddha said, after enlightenment one should “return to the marketplace” and practice compassion for all living beings. A sense of peace, serenity and loving-kindness are the hallmarks of all true religious insight. Luther, however, was a rabid anti-Semite, a misogynist, was convulsed with a loathing and horror of sexuality and believed that all rebellious peasants should be killed. His vision of a wrathful God had filled him with personal rage, and it has been suggested that his belligerent character did great harm to the Reformation. At the beginning of his career as a Reformer many of his ideas were held by orthodox Catholics, and they could have given the Church a new vitality, but Luther’s aggressive tactics caused them to be regarded with unnecessary suspicion.²⁹

从长远来看，路德的重要性不及约翰·加尔文（1500-1564）。加尔文的瑞士宗教改革比路德的改革更多地基于文艺复兴的理念，对新兴的西方精神产生了深远的影响。到16世纪末，“加尔文主义”已成为一种国际性的宗教，无论好坏，它都能够改变社会，并激励人们相信自己可以实现任何愿望。加尔文主义思想启发了1645年奥利弗·克伦威尔领导的英国清教徒革命，以及17世纪20年代新英格兰的殖民活动。路德的思想在他去世后主要局限于德国，而加尔文的思想似乎更具进步性。他的门徒发展了他的教义，并引发了第二次宗教改革浪潮。正如历史学家休·特雷弗·罗珀所指出的，加尔文主义比罗马天主教更容易被其信徒抛弃——因此有了“一日天主教徒，终身天主教徒”这句谚语。^然而，加尔文主义也留下了独特的印记：一旦被抛弃，它便能以世俗的方式表达出来。30这一点在美国尤为明显。许多不再信奉上帝的美国人信奉清教徒的伦理道德和加尔文主义的拣选论，将自己视为“天选之国”，认为他们的国旗和理想具有某种神圣的意义。我们已经看到，各大宗教在某种意义上都是文明的产物，更具体地说，是……的产物。这座城市。它们兴起于富裕的商人阶层逐渐凌驾于旧异教统治之上，并渴望掌握自身命运的时期。加尔文的基督教版本对欧洲新兴城市的资产阶级尤其具有吸引力，这些城市的居民渴望摆脱压迫性等级制度的束缚。

In the long term, Luther was less important than John Calvin (1500–64) whose Swiss Reformation, based more than Luther’s on the ideals of the Renaissance, had a profound effect on the emerging Western ethos. By the end of the sixteenth century, “Calvinism” had been established as an international religion that, for good or ill, was able to transform society and give people the inspiration to believe that they could achieve whatever they wanted. Calvinistic ideas inspired the Puritan revolution in England under Oliver Cromwell in 1645 and the colonization of New England in the 1620s. Luther’s ideas were in the main confined to Germany after his death, but Calvin’s seemed the more progressive. His disciples developed his teaching and effected the second wave of the Reformation. As the historian Hugh Trevor Roper has remarked, Calvinism is more easily discarded by its adherents than Roman Catholicism—hence the adage “once a Catholic always a Catholic.” Yet Calvinism makes its own impression: once discarded, it can be expressed in secular ways.³⁰ This has been especially true in the United States. Many Americans who no longer believe in God subscribe to the Puritan work ethic and to the Calvinist notion of election, seeing themselves as a “chosen nation,” whose flag and ideals have a semidivine purpose. We have seen that the major religions were all in one sense products of civilization and, more specifically, of the city. They had developed at a time when the wealthy merchant classes were gaining an ascendancy over the old pagan establishment and wanted to take their destiny into their own hands. Calvin’s version of Christianity was especially attractive to the bourgeoisie in the newly developing cities of Europe, whose inhabitants wanted to shake off the shackles of a repressive hierarchy.

与早期的瑞士神学家乌尔里希·茨温利（1484-1531）一样，加尔文对教义并不特别感兴趣：他关注的是宗教的社会、政治和经济层面。他希望回归一种更简朴、更符合圣经的虔诚，但坚持三位一体的教义，尽管其术语并非源自圣经。正如他在《基督教要义》中所写，上帝宣告祂是独一的，但“却清楚地向我们阐明祂以三个位格存在”。 ³¹ 1553年，加尔文处死了西班牙神学家米歇尔·塞尔维特，因为他否认三位一体。塞尔维特逃离了天主教西班牙，来到加尔文的日内瓦避难，声称他正在回归使徒和早期教父的信仰，而这些人从未听说过这种非同寻常的教义。塞尔维特的论点不无道理，他认为新约圣经中没有任何内容与犹太教经典严格的一神论相矛盾。三位一体的教义是人为捏造的，它“使人们的心灵远离了对真基督的认识，并向我们呈现了一个三位一体的上帝”。 ³²他的信仰也为两位意大利宗教改革家——乔治·布兰德拉塔（约1515-1588）和福斯图斯·索西努斯（1539-1604）——所认同。他们都逃往日内瓦，但发现他们的神学思想对于瑞士宗教改革而言过于激进；他们甚至不认同传统的西方赎罪论。他们认为，男女并非因基督的死而称义，而是仅仅因他们对上帝的“信仰”或信赖而称义。在《救世主基督》一书中，索西努斯驳斥了所谓的尼西亚正统教义：“上帝之子”并非指耶稣的神性，而仅仅意味着他蒙受上帝的特别眷爱。他并非为赎我们的罪而死，而仅仅是一位“指引和教导救赎之道”的教师。至于三位一体的教义，他认为那纯粹是“怪诞之物”，一种“违背理性”的虚构，实际上却鼓励信徒们信仰三个不同的神。 ³³塞尔维特被处决后，布兰德拉塔和索西努斯都逃往波兰和特兰西瓦尼亚，并将他们的“一神论”信仰带到了那里。

Like the earlier Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), Calvin was not particularly interested in dogma: his concern was centered on the social, political and economic aspects of religion. He wanted to return to a simpler, scriptural piety but adhered to the doctrine of the Trinity, despite the unbiblical provenance of its terminology. As he wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, God had declared that he was One but “clearly sets this before us as existing in three persons.”³¹ In 1553 Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity. Servetus had fled Catholic Spain and had taken refuge in Calvin’s Geneva, claiming that he was returning to the faith of the apostles and the earliest Fathers of the Church, who had never heard of this extraordinary doctrine. With some justice, Servetus argued that there was nothing in the New Testament to contradict the strict monotheism of the Jewish scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity was a human fabrication which had “alienated the minds of men from the knowledge of the true Christ and presented us with a tripartite God.”³² His beliefs were shared by two Italian reformers—Giorgio Blandrata (ca. 1515–1588) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)—who had both fled to Geneva but discovered that their theology was too radical for the Swiss Reformation; they did not even adhere to the traditional Western view of the atonement. They did not believe that men and women were justified by Christ’s death but simply by their “faith” or trust in God. In his book Christ the Savior, Socinus repudiated the so-called orthodoxy of Nicaea: the term “Son of God” was not a statement about Jesus’ divine nature but simply meant that he was specially loved by God. He had not died to atone for our sins but was simply a teacher who “showed and taught the way of salvation.” As for the doctrine of the Trinity, that was simply a “monstrosity,” an imaginary fiction that was “repugnant to reason” and actually encouraged the faithful to believe in three separate gods.³³ After the execution of Servetus, Blandrata and Socinus both fled to Poland and Transylvania, taking their “Unitarian” religion with them.

茨温利和加尔文秉持着更为传统的上帝观念，并且像路德一样，强调上帝的绝对主权。这并非仅仅是一种理性的信念，而是源于深刻的个人体验。1519年8月，茨温利在苏黎世开始传教不久，便感染了瘟疫，这场瘟疫最终夺去了该城四分之一人口的生命。他感到彻底的无助，意识到自己根本无力自救。他没有想到向圣徒祈祷，也没有请求教会为他代祷。相反，他完全仰赖上帝的怜悯。他写下了这篇简短的祷文：

Zwingli and Calvin relied on more conventional ideas of God and, like Luther, they emphasized his absolute sovereignty. This was not simply an intellectual conviction but the result of an intensely personal experience. In August 1519, shortly after he had begun his ministry in Zurich, Zwingli contracted the plague that eventually wiped out twenty-five percent of the population of the city. He felt completely helpless, realizing that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. It did not occur to him to pray to the saints for help or ask the Church to intercede for him. Instead he threw himself on God’s mercy. He composed this short prayer:

他的顺服与伊斯兰教的理想相似：如同处于相似发展阶段的犹太人和穆斯林一样，西方基督徒不再愿意接受中间人，而是逐渐意识到自己对上帝不可推卸的责任。加尔文也以上帝的绝对统治为基础建立了他的改革宗教。他没有留下关于自己皈依经历的完整记载。在他的《诗篇注释》中，他只是简单地告诉我们，这完全是上帝的作为。他曾完全被教会体制和“教皇的迷信”所束缚。他既无力也无意挣脱，最终是上帝的作为改变了他：“最终，上帝以他隐秘的旨意，将我引向了不同的方向……他使我突然变得顺服，驯服了我那颗与年龄不符的顽固之心。” ³⁵唯有上帝掌管一切，加尔文完全无能为力，然而，正是他对自身失败和无能的深刻认识，让他感到自己被选中承担一项特殊的使命。

His surrender was similar to the ideal of islam: like Jews and Muslims at a comparable stage of their development, Western Christians were no longer willing to accept mediators but were evolving a sense of their inalienable responsibility before God. Calvin also based his reformed religion on God’s absolute rule. He has not left us with a full account of his conversion experience. In his Commentary on the Psalms, he simply tells us that it was entirely the work of God. He had been completely enthralled by the institutional Church and “the superstitions of the papacy.” He was both unable and unwilling to break free, and it had taken an act of God to shift him: “At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence.… By a sudden conversion to docility, he tamed a mind too stubborn for its years.”³⁵ God alone was in control and Calvin absolutely powerless, yet he felt singled out for a special mission precisely by his acute sense of his own failure and impotence.

自奥古斯丁时代以来，激进的转变一直是西方基督教的特征。新教延续了与过去决裂的传统，正如美国哲学家威廉·詹姆斯所言，这是一种为“病态灵魂”而设的“重生”宗教。 ³⁶基督徒们“重生”，建立起对上帝的新信仰，并摒弃了中世纪教会中横亘在他们与神之间的众多中间人。加尔文指出，人们出于焦虑而敬拜圣徒；他们渴望通过博得与神最亲近之人的青睐来安抚愤怒的上帝。然而，新教徒在摒弃圣徒崇拜的同时，也常常流露出同样的焦虑。当他们得知圣徒无能为力时，他们对这位顽固不化的上帝所怀有的恐惧和敌意似乎瞬间爆发。强烈的反应。英国人文主义者托马斯·莫尔在许多抨击圣徒崇拜“偶像崇拜”的檄文中，察觉到了一种个人仇恨。 ³⁷这种仇恨体现在他们砸毁偶像的暴力行为中。许多新教徒和清教徒非常认真地对待旧约中对偶像的谴责，他们砸碎圣徒和圣母玛利亚的雕像，并在教堂和主教座堂的壁画上泼洒石灰。他们狂热的举动表明，他们和以前向圣徒祈求代祷时一样，都害怕触怒这位易怒且嫉妒的上帝。这也表明，这种只敬拜上帝的热忱并非源于平静的信念，而是源于焦虑的否认，正如古代以色列人拆毁亚舍拉的柱子，并对邻邦的神明进行猛烈抨击一样。

The radical conversion had been characteristic of Western Christianity since the time of Augustine. Protestantism would continue the tradition of breaking abruptly and violently with the past in what the American philosopher William James called a “twice-born” religion for “sick souls.”³⁶ Christians were being “born again” to a new faith in God and a rejection of the host of intermediaries that had stood between them and the divine in the medieval Church. Calvin said that people had venerated the saints out of anxiety; they had wanted to propitiate an angry God by gaining the ear of those closest to him. Yet in their rejection of the cult of the saints, Protestants often betrayed an equal anxiety. When they heard the news that the saints were ineffective, a good deal of the fear and hostility they had felt for this intransigent God seemed to explode in an intense reaction. The English humanist Thomas More detected a personal hatred in many of the diatribes against the “idolatry” of saint-worship.³⁷ This came out in the violence of their image-smashing. Many Protestants and Puritans took the condemnation of graven images in the Old Testament very seriously when they shattered the statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary and hurled whitewash over the frescoes in the churches and cathedrals. Their frantic zeal showed that they were just as fearful of offending this irritable and jealous God as they had been when they had prayed to the saints to intercede for them. It also showed that this zeal to worship God alone did not spring from a calm conviction but from the anxious denial that had caused the ancient Israelites to tear down the poles of Asherah and pour torrents of abuse upon their neighbors’ gods.

人们通常记住加尔文是因为他相信预定论，但事实上，预定论并非他思想的核心：直到他去世后，预定论才成为“加尔文主义”的关键所在。如何调和上帝的全能全知与人类的自由意志这一难题，源于一种拟人化的上帝观。我们已经看到，穆斯林在九世纪就遇到了这一难题，却找不到合乎逻辑或理性的解决之道；相反，他们强调上帝的神秘和不可测度。这个问题从未困扰过希腊东正教基督徒，他们乐于接受悖论，并将其视为启迪和灵感的源泉；但在西方，由于更倾向于人格化的上帝观，这个问题却成了争论的焦点。人们试图将“上帝的旨意”描述得如同上帝是一个人，受到与我们相同的约束，并像世俗的统治者一样实际地统治着世界。然而，天主教会谴责了上帝预定罪人永世下地狱的说法。例如，奥古斯丁曾用“预定论”来描述上帝拯救选民的决定，但他否认有些迷失的灵魂注定要下地狱，尽管这恰恰是他思想的逻辑推论。加尔文在《基督教要义》中对预定论着墨甚少。他承认，环顾四周，似乎上帝确实更偏爱某些人而非其他人。为什么有些人回应福音，而有些人却漠不关心？上帝的作为是任意的还是不公平的？加尔文否认了这一点：对某些人的明显拣选和对另一些人的拒绝，正是上帝奥秘的体现。38^这个问题没有合理的答案，这似乎意味着上帝的爱与他的公义是不可调和的。但这并没有让加尔文过于困扰，因为他对教条并不感兴趣。

Calvin is usually remembered for his belief in predestination, but in fact this was not central to his thought: it did not become crucial to “Calvinism” until after his death. The problem of reconciling God’s omnipotence and omniscience with human free will springs from an anthropomorphic conception of God. We have seen that Muslims had come up against this difficulty during the ninth century and had found no logical or rational way out of it; instead, they had stressed the mystery and inscrutability of God. The problem had never troubled the Greek Orthodox Christians, who enjoyed paradox and found it a source of light and inspiration, but it had been a bone of contention in the West, where a more personalistic view of God prevailed. People tried to talk about “God’s will” as though he were a human being, subject to the same constraints as us and literally governing the world, like an earthly ruler. Yet the Catholic Church had condemned the idea that God had predestined the damned to hell for all eternity. Augustine, for example, had applied the term “predestination” to God’s decision to save the elect but had denied that some lost souls were doomed to perdition, even though this was the logical corollary of his thought. Calvin gave very little space to the topic of predestination in the Institutes. When we looked about us, he admitted, it seemed that God did indeed favor some people more than others. Why did some respond to the Gospel while others remained indifferent? Was God acting in a way that was arbitrary or unfair? Calvin denied this: the apparent choice of some and the rejection of others was a sign of the mystery of God.³⁸ There was no rational solution to the problem, which seemed to imply that God’s love and his justice were irreconcilable. This did not trouble Calvin overmuch, since he was not very interested in dogma.

然而，加尔文去世后，为了与路德宗和罗马天主教区分开来，“加尔文主义者”便将预定论确立为加尔文主义的标志。西奥多拉斯·贝扎（1519-1605）曾是加尔文在日内瓦的得力助手，并在加尔文去世后接管了教会的领导权。他以严密的逻辑解决了这一悖论。既然上帝是全能的，那么人就无法为自身的救赎做出任何贡献。上帝永恒不变，他的旨意公正且永恒：因此，他从亘古就决定拯救一部分人，而预定其余的人遭受永恒的诅咒。一些加尔文主义者对这种令人反感的教义感到震惊。在低地国家，雅各布·阿米尼乌斯认为这是一种错误的教义，因为它把上帝当作一个普通人来谈论。但加尔文主义者相信，上帝可以像其他任何现象一样被客观地讨论。与其他新教徒和天主教徒一样，他们发展出一种新的亚里士多德主义，强调逻辑和形而上学的重要性。这与圣托马斯·阿奎那的亚里士多德主义不同，因为这些新神学家对亚里士多德思想的内容并不像对他的理性方法那样感兴趣。他们想把基督教呈现为一个连贯且理性的体系，这个体系可以从基于已知公理的三段论推导中得出。当然，这极具讽刺意味，因为宗教改革家们都曾拒绝过这种理性主义的上帝论证。后期加尔文主义的预定论神学表明，当上帝的悖论和奥秘不再被视为诗意，而是被用一种连贯却令人恐惧的逻辑来解读时，将会发生什么。一旦圣经开始被字面解读而非象征解读，其中的上帝概念就变得不可能了。想象一个对世间万物负有字面责任的神，本身就包含着不可能的矛盾。圣经中的“上帝”不再是超越现实的象征，而变成了一个残暴专制的暴君。预定论揭示了这种人格化的上帝的局限性。

After his death, however, when “Calviniste” needed to distinguish themselves from Lutherans on the one hand and Roman Catholics on the other, Theodoras Beza (1519–1605), who had been Calvin’s right-hand man in Geneva and took on the leadership after his death, made predestination the distinguishing mark of Calvinism. He ironed out the paradox with relentless logic. Since God was all-powerful, it followed that man could contribute nothing toward his own salvation. God was changeless and his decrees were just and eternal: thus he had decided from all eternity to save some but had predestined the rest to eternal damnation. Some Calvinists recoiled in horror from this obnoxious doctrine. In the Low Countries, Jakob Arminius argued that this was an example of bad theology, since it spoke of God as though he were a mere human being. But Calvinists believed that God could be discussed as objectively as any other phenomenon. Like other Protestants and Catholics, they were developing a new Aristotelianism, which stressed the importance of logic and metaphysics. This was different from the Aristotelianism of St. Thomas Aquinas, since the new theologians were not as interested in the content of Aristotle’s thought as in his rational method. They wanted to present Christianity as a coherent and rational system that could be derived from syllogistic deductions based on known axioms. This was deeply ironic, of course, since the Reformers had all rejected this type of rationalistic discussion of God. The latter-day Calvinist theology of predestination showed what could happen when the paradox and mystery of God were no longer regarded as poetry but were interpreted with a coherent but terrifying logic. Once the Bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible. To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions. The “God” of the Bible ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel and despotic tyrant. The doctrine of predestination shows the limitations of such a personalized God.

清教徒的宗教体验以加尔文为基础，他们显然觉得与上帝相处十分艰难：上帝似乎既没有赐予他们幸福，也没有给予他们怜悯。他们的日记和自传表明，他们痴迷于预定论，并恐惧自己无法得救。皈依成为他们关注的核心，一场充满暴力和痛苦的戏剧，其中“罪人”和他的灵性导师为了灵魂而“搏斗”。通常，忏悔者必须经历严重的羞辱或对上帝的恩典感到真正的绝望，直到他意识到自己完全依赖于上帝。皈依往往代表着一种心理上的宣泄，一种……这种情绪在极度绝望和狂喜之间摇摆不定，极度不健康。对地狱和永罚的过分强调，加上过度的自我审视，导致许多人患上临床抑郁症：自杀似乎十分普遍。清教徒将此归咎于撒旦，在他们看来，撒旦在生活中拥有与上帝同等的强大影响力。 ³⁹清教主义确实也有积极的一面：它使人们对自己的工作感到自豪，而此前工作被视为一种奴役，如今却被视为一种“使命”。其紧迫的末世论精神激励了一些人去殖民新大陆。但在最糟糕的情况下，清教徒的上帝引发了焦虑，并对那些不属于“选民”之列的人抱有严厉的偏见。

Puritans based their religious experience on Calvin and clearly found God a struggle: he did not seem to imbue them with either happiness or compassion. Their journals and autobiographies show that they were obsessed with predestination and a terror that they would not be saved. Conversion became a central preoccupation, a violent, tortured drama in which the “sinner” and his spiritual director “wrestled” for his soul. Frequently the penitent had to undergo severe humiliation or experience real despair of God’s grace until he appreciated his utter dependence upon God. Often the conversion represented a psychological abreaction, an unhealthy swing from extreme desolation to elation. The heavy emphasis on hell and damnation combined with an excessive self-scrutiny led many into clinical depression: suicide seems to have been prevalent. Puritans attributed this to Satan, who seemed as powerful a presence in their lives as God.³⁹ Puritanism did have a positive dimension: it gave people pride in their work, which had hitherto been experienced as a slavery but which was now seen as a “calling.” Its urgent apocalyptic spirituality inspired some to colonize the New World. But at its worst, the Puritan God inspired anxiety and a harsh intolerance of those who were not among the elect.

天主教徒和新教徒当时视彼此为敌人，但事实上，他们对上帝的理解和体验却惊人地相似。特伦托公会议（1545-1563）之后，天主教神学家也开始信奉新亚里士多德主义神学，将对上帝的研究简化为一门自然科学。像耶稣会创始人伊格内修斯·罗耀拉（1491-1556）这样的改革家，与新教徒一样，强调直接体验上帝，并认为需要领悟启示，使其成为自己独特的体验。他为第一批耶稣会士设计的《灵修操练》旨在引导他们皈依基督教，这既可以是痛苦煎熬的经历，也可以是无比喜乐的体验。这种为期三十天的灵修操练强调自我反省和个人抉择，由一位指导者一对一带领，与清教徒的灵修方式颇为相似。《灵修操练》堪称一套系统而高效的神秘主义速成课程。神秘主义者经常发展出与当今精神分析学家所使用的方法类似的学科，因此，有趣的是，天主教徒和圣公会教徒如今也使用这些练习来提供一种替代疗法。

Catholics and Protestants now regarded one another as enemies, but in fact their conception and experience of God were remarkably similar. After the Council of Trent (1545–63), Catholic theologians also committed themselves to the neo-Aristotelian theology, which reduced the study of God to a natural science. Reformers like Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, shared the Protestant emphasis on direct experience of God and the need to appropriate revelation and make it uniquely one’s own. The Spiritual Exercises which he evolved for his first Jesuits were intended to induce a conversion, which could be a wracking, painful experience as well as an extremely joyful one. With its emphasis on self-examination and personal decision, this thirty-day retreat undertaken on a one-to-one basis with a director was not dissimilar to Puritan spirituality. The Exercises represent a systematic, highly efficient crash course in mysticism. Mystics had often evolved disciplines that were similar to those used today by psychoanalysts and it is, therefore, interesting that the Exercises are also being used today by Catholics and Anglicans to provide an alternative type of therapy.

然而，伊格内修斯深知虚假神秘主义的危险。如同卢里亚一样，他强调宁静与喜乐的重要性，并在《辨别灵性规则》中告诫门徒，要警惕那些将一些清教徒推向极端的情绪。他将修行者在静修期间可能经历的各种情绪分为两类：一类可能来自上帝，另一类则可能来自魔鬼。上帝应被体验为平安、希望、喜乐和“心灵的提升”，而不安、悲伤、枯燥和心神涣散则来自“邪灵”。伊格内修斯对上帝的感知十分敏锐：这曾让他喜极而泣，他曾说过，没有上帝，他将无法生存。但他不信任剧烈的情绪波动，并强调在通往新自我的旅程中，自律至关重要。如同加尔文一样，他将基督教视为与基督的相遇，并在《灵修操练》中对此进行了阐述：最终的高潮是……《获得爱的默想》将“万物视为上帝良善的造物和反映”。 ⁴⁰在依纳爵看来，世界充满了上帝。在册封圣人的过程中，他的门徒回忆道：

Ignatius was aware of the dangers of false mysticism, however. Like Luria, he stressed the importance of serenity and joy, warning his disciples against the extremes of emotion that pushed some Puritans over the edge in his Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. He divides the various emotions that the exercitant is likely to experience during his retreat into those which were likely to come from God and those which came from the devil. God was to be experienced as peace, hope, joy and an “elevation of mind,” while disquiet, sadness, aridity and distraction came from “the evil spirit.” Ignatius’s own sense of God was acute: it used to make him weep with joy, and he once said that without it he would be unable to live. But he distrusted violent swings of emotion and stressed the need for discipline in his journey to a new self. Like Calvin, he saw Christianity as an encounter with Christ, which he plotted in the Exercises: the culmination was the “Contemplation for Obtaining Love,” which sees “all things as creatures of the goodness of God and reflections of it.”⁴⁰ For Ignatius the world was full of God. During the canonization process, his disciples recalled:

与清教徒一样，耶稣会士也视上帝为一种充满活力的力量，这种力量在最佳状态下能赋予他们信心和活力。正如清教徒勇敢地横渡大西洋定居新英格兰一样，耶稣会传教士也周游世界：方济·沙勿略（1506-1552）在印度和日本传播福音，利玛窦（1552-1610）将福音带到中国，罗伯特·德·诺比利（1577-1656）则前往印度。同样，耶稣会士也常常是充满热情的科学家，甚至有人认为，第一个科学团体并非伦敦皇家学会或意大利物理学会，而是耶稣会。

Like the Puritans, Jesuits experienced God as a dynamic force which, at its best, could fill them with confidence and energy. As Puritans braved the Atlantic to settle in New England, Jesuit missionaries traveled the globe: Francis Xavier (1506–1552) evangelized India and Japan, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) took the Gospel to China and Robert de Nobili (1577–1656) to India. Like the Puritans again, Jesuits were often enthusiastic scientists, and it has been suggested that the first scientific society was not the Royal Society of London or the Accademia del Cimento but the Society of Jesus.

然而，天主教徒似乎和清教徒一样忧心忡忡。例如，伊格内修斯自认为罪孽深重，甚至祈祷死后尸体被弃置于粪堆上，任由鸟犬吞噬。他的医生警告他，如果在弥撒中继续如此痛哭流涕，可能会失明。改革赤足加尔默罗会女修道生活的阿维拉的特蕾莎，曾梦见地狱中为她预留的可怕景象。当时的伟大圣徒似乎认为世俗与上帝是水火不容的对立面：要想得救，就必须舍弃世俗和一切自然的情感。毕生行善积德的文森特·德·保罗，曾祈祷上帝带走他对父母的爱；创立圣母往见会的简·弗朗西斯·德·尚塔尔，在前往修道院时，跨过了她儿子的遗体：他为了阻止她离开，纵身跃过门槛。文艺复兴时期试图调和天地，而天主教改革则试图将二者割裂。上帝或许赋予了西方改革后的基督徒高效而强大的力量，但他并未让他们感到幸福。宗教改革时期，双方都充满了恐惧：他们猛烈地否定过去，严厉地谴责和诅咒异端邪说，对异端邪说和教义偏差感到恐惧，对罪恶有着高度的警觉。对地狱的痴迷。1640年，荷兰天主教徒康奈尔斯·詹森（Cornells Jansen）出版了一本颇具争议的书。这本书与新加尔文主义一样，宣扬一位令人恐惧的上帝，祂预定了除选民之外的所有人遭受永恒的诅咒。加尔文主义者自然对这本书赞不绝口，认为它“教导了上帝恩典不可抗拒的力量的教义，这既正确又符合改革宗的教义。” ⁴²

Yet Catholics seemed as troubled as the Puritans. Ignatius, for example, regarded himself as such a great sinner that he prayed that after his death his body might be exposed on a dung heap to be devoured by birds and dogs. His doctors warned him that if he continued to weep so bitterly during Mass, he might lose his sight. Teresa of Avila, who reformed the monastic life of women in the order of discalced Carmelites, had a terrifying vision of the place reserved for her in Hell. The great saints of the period seemed to regard the world and God as irreconcilable opposites: to be saved one had to renounce the world and all natural affections. Vincent de Paul, who lived a life of charity and good works, prayed that God would take away his love for his parents; Jane Francis de Chantal, who founded the Order of the Visitation, stepped over the prone body of her son when she went to join her convent: he had flung himself over the threshold to prevent her departure. Where the Renaissance had tried to reconcile heaven and earth, the Catholic Reformation tried to split them asunder. God may have made the reformed Christians of the West efficient and powerful, but he did not make them happy. The Reformation period was a time of great fear on both sides: there were violent repudiations of the past, bitter condemnations and anathemas, a terror of heresy and doctrinal deviation, a hyperactive awareness of sin and an obsession with Hell. In 1640 the controversial book of the Dutch Catholic Cornells Jansen was published, which, like the new Calvinism, preached a frightening God who had predestined all men except the elect to eternal damnation. Naturally Calvinists praised the book, finding that it “taught the doctrine of the irresistible power of the grace of God that is correct and in accordance with Reformed doctrine.”⁴²

我们该如何解释欧洲普遍存在的恐惧和沮丧？那是一个极度焦虑的时期：一种基于科学技术的新型社会正在兴起，并将很快征服世界。然而，上帝似乎无法缓解这些恐惧，也无法像塞法迪犹太人那样，从伊萨克·卢里亚的神话中获得慰藉。西方基督徒似乎一直觉得上帝是一种负担，而那些试图缓解这些宗教焦虑的宗教改革者，最终似乎反而使情况变得更糟。西方人所信奉的上帝，被认为注定要将数百万人推向永恒的诅咒，这甚至比特土良或奥古斯丁在黑暗时期所设想的严厉神祇更加可怕。难道基于神话和神秘主义的、刻意想象的上帝形象，比那些被字面解读的神话更能有效地赋予人们勇气，使他们能够从悲剧和苦难中幸存下来吗？

How can we account for this widespread fear and dismay in Europe? It was a period of extreme anxiety: a new kind of society, based on science and technology, was beginning to emerge that would shortly conquer the world. Yet God seemed unable to alleviate these fears and provide the consolation that the Sephardic Jews, for example, had found in the myths of Isaac Luria. The Christians of the West had always seemed to find that God was something of a strain and the Reformers, who had sought to allay these religious anxieties, seem ultimately to have made matters worse. The God of the West, who was believed to predestine millions of human beings to everlasting damnation, had become even more frightening than the harsh deity envisaged by Tertullian or Augustine in his darker moments. Could it be that a deliberately imaginative conception of God, based on mythology and mysticism, is more effective as a means of giving his people courage to survive tragedy and distress than a God whose myths are interpreted literally?

的确，到了十六世纪末，欧洲许多人感到宗教的信誉已严重受损。他们对天主教徒被新教徒杀害、新教徒被天主教徒杀害的行为感到愤慨。数百人因持有无法证实或证伪的观点而殉道。各种教派如雨后春笋般涌现，宣扬着令人眼花缭乱、却又被认为是救赎的必要条件。如今，神学选择过多，许多人感到无所适从，苦恼不已。有些人甚至觉得，信仰比以往任何时候都更加难以获得。因此，在西方上帝历史的这个阶段，人们开始注意到“无神论者”，他们的数量似乎与“女巫”——上帝的宿敌、魔鬼的盟友——一样多，这意义非凡。据说，这些“无神论者”否认上帝的存在，正在招揽信徒加入他们的教派，并破坏社会结构。然而，事实上，我们今天所说的彻底的无神论是不可能的。正如吕西安·费弗尔在其经典著作《十六世纪的无信仰问题》中所指出的，当时彻底否认上帝存在的概念障碍如此巨大，以至于无法克服。从出生和洗礼到死亡和葬于教堂墓地，宗教主宰着每个男女的生活。教堂的钟声不时响起，召唤信徒祈祷，日常生活的方方面面都浸透着宗教信仰和宗教机构：它们主导着职业生活和公共生活——甚至连行会和大学都是宗教组织。正如费弗尔所指出的，上帝和宗教无处不在，以至于当时没有人会想到：“我们的生活，我们生活的方方面面，都被基督教所主宰！与仍然受宗教支配、规范和塑造的一切相比，我们生活中已经世俗化的领域是多么渺小啊！” ⁴³即使一个杰出的人能够达到质疑宗教本质和上帝存在的客观性，他也无法在当时的哲学或科学中找到任何支持。在形成一套连贯的论证体系，并且每一条论证都基于另一组科学验证之前，没有人能够否认上帝的存在，而他的宗教塑造并主宰着欧洲的道德、情感、审美和政治生活。如果没有这种支持，这种否认只能是个人的一时兴起或一时冲动，不值得认真考虑。正如费弗尔所指出的，像法语这样的白话语言既缺乏词汇也缺乏表达怀疑论的句法。“绝对”、“相对”、“因果关系”、“概念”和“直觉”等词汇当时尚未出现。 ⁴⁴我们还应该记住，当时世界上没有任何一个社会消除宗教，宗教被视为生活的一部分，是理所当然的。直到十八世纪末，才有一些欧洲人开始质疑上帝的存在。

Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, many people in Europe felt that religion had been gravely discredited. They were disgusted by the killing of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics. Hundreds of people had died as martyrs for holding views that it was impossible to prove one way or the other. Sects preaching a bewildering variety of doctrines that were deemed essential for salvation had proliferated alarmingly. There was now too much theological choice: many felt paralyzed and distressed by the variety of religious interpretations on offer. Some may have felt that faith was becoming harder to achieve than ever. It was, therefore, significant that at this point in the history of the Western God, people started spotting “atheists,” who seemed to be as numerous as the “witches,” the old enemies of God and allies of the devil. It was said that these “atheists” had denied the existence of God, were acquiring converts to their sect and undermining the fabric of society. Yet in fact a full-blown atheism in the sense that we use the word today was impossible. As Lucien Febvre has shown in his classic book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God’s existence at this time were so great as to be insurmountable. From birth and baptism to death and burial in the churchyard, religion dominated the life of every single man and woman. Every activity of the day, which was punctuated with church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life—even the guilds and the universities were religious organizations. As Febvre points out, God and religion were so ubiquitous that nobody at this stage thought to say: “So our life, the whole of our life, is dominated by Christianity! How tiny is the area of our lives that is already secularized, compared to everything that is still governed, regulated and shaped by religion!”⁴³ Even if an exceptional man could have achieved the objectivity necessary to question the nature of religion and the existence of God, he would have found no support in either the philosophy or the science of his time. Until there had formed a body of coherent reasons, each of which was based on another cluster of scientific verifications, nobody could deny the existence of a God whose religion shaped and dominated the moral, emotional, aesthetic and political life of Europe. Without this support, such a denial could only be a personal whim or a passing impulse that was unworthy of serious consideration. As Febvre has shown, a vernacular language such as French lacked either the vocabulary or the syntax for skepticism. Such words as “absolute,” “relative,” “causality,” “concept” and “intuition” were not yet in use.⁴⁴ We should also remember that as yet no society in the world had eliminated religion, which was taken for granted as a fact of life. Not until the very end of the eighteenth century would a few Europeans find it possible to deny the existence of God.

那么，人们互相指责对方是“无神论者”时，究竟指的是什么呢？法国科学家马兰·梅森（1588-1648）同时也是一位严守戒律的方济各会修士，他宣称仅在巴黎就有大约五万名无神论者，但他所列举的大多数“无神论者”其实都信仰上帝。例如，米歇尔·蒙田的朋友皮埃尔·卡兰在其著作《三大真理》（1589）中捍卫了天主教，但在其主要著作《论智慧》中，他却强调了理性的脆弱性，并声称人只能通过信仰才能接近上帝。梅森对此并不赞同，认为这等同于“无神论”。他谴责的另一位“不信者”是意大利理性主义者乔尔丹诺·布鲁诺（1548-1600），尽管布鲁诺信仰的是一种斯多葛式的上帝，认为他是宇宙的灵魂、起源和终极目标。梅森称这两人为“无神论者”，是因为他与他们对于上帝的看法不同，而不是因为他们否认至高无上的存在。同样地，罗马帝国的异教徒也称犹太人和基督徒为“无神论者”，因为他们对神的看法与他们不同。在十六和十七世纪……几个世纪以来，“无神论者”一词仍然完全用于论战。事实上，你可以像在19世纪末20世纪初给任何人贴上“无政府主义者”或“共产主义者”的标签一样，把你的任何敌人称为“无神论者”。

What, then, did people mean when they accused one another of “atheism”? The French scientist Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who was also a member of a strict Franciscan order, declared that there were about 50,000 atheists in Paris alone, but most of the “atheists” he named believed in God. Thus Pierre Carrin, the friend of Michel Montaigne, had defended Catholicism in his treatise Les Trois Vérités (1589), but in his chief work, De La Sagesse, he had stressed the frailty of reason and claimed that man could only reach God through faith. Mersenne disapproved of this and saw it as tantamount to “atheism.” Another of the “unbelievers” he denounced was the Italian rationalist Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), even though Bruno believed in a sort of Stoic God who was the soul, origin and end of the universe. Mersenne called both these men “atheists” because he disagreed with them about God, not because they denied the existence of a Supreme Being. In rather the same way, pagans of the Roman empire had called Jews and Christians “atheists” because their opinion of the divine had differed from their own. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word “atheist” was still reserved exclusively for polemic. Indeed, it was possible to call any of your enemies an “atheist” in much the same way as people were dubbed “anarchists” or “communists” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

宗教改革之后，人们对基督教产生了新的焦虑。“无神论者”如同“女巫”（或者更确切地说，“无政府主义者”或“共产主义者”）一样，是人们内心深处焦虑的投射。它反映了人们对信仰的隐秘担忧，并可作为一种震慑手段，用来吓唬虔诚的信徒，从而激励他们追求美德。在《教会政体法》中，英国圣公会神学家理查德·胡克（1554-1600）声称，无神论者分为两类：一小群人完全不相信上帝，而另一群人则像上帝不存在一样生活。人们往往忽略了这种区别，而将注意力集中在后一种务实的无神论上。因此，在托马斯·比尔德的《上帝审判剧场》（1597）中，他笔下的虚构“无神论者”否认上帝的眷顾、灵魂不朽和来世，但显然并不否认上帝的存在。约翰·温菲尔德在其著作《无神论的剖析》（1634年）中宣称：“伪君子是无神论者；放荡不羁的恶人是公开的无神论者；肆无忌惮、胆大妄为的违法者是无神论者；不愿接受教导或改造的人是无神论者。” ⁴⁵ 威尔士诗人威廉·沃恩（1577-1641）曾参与纽芬兰的殖民活动，他认为那些征收租金或圈占公共土地的人显然是无神论者。英国剧作家托马斯·纳什（1567-1601）则宣称，野心勃勃者、贪婪者、饕餮者、虚荣者以及妓女都是无神论者。

After the Reformation, people had become anxious about Christianity in a new way. Like “the witch” (or, indeed, “the anarchist” or “the communist”), “the atheist” was the projection of a buried anxiety. It reflected a hidden worry about the faith and could be used as a shock tactic to frighten the godly and encourage them in virtue. In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600) claimed that there were two kinds of atheists: a tiny group who did not believe in God and a much larger number who lived as though God did not exist. People tended to lose sight of this distinction and concentrated on the latter, practical type of atheism. Thus in The Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597), Thomas Beard’s imaginary “atheist” denied the providence of God, the immortality of the soul and the afterlife but not, apparently, the existence of God. In his tract Atheism Closed and Open Anatomized (1634), John Wingfield claimed: “the hypocrite is an Atheist; the loose wicked man is an open Atheist; the secure, bold and proud transgressor is an Atheist: he that will not be taught or reformed is an Atheist.”⁴⁵ For the Welsh poet William Vaughan (1577–1641), who helped in the colonization of Newfoundland, those who raised rents or enclosed commons were obvious atheists. The English dramatist Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) proclaimed that the ambitious, the greedy, the gluttons, the vainglorious and prostitutes were all atheists.

“无神论者”一词曾是侮辱性的。没有人会自称无神论者，这在当时还不是一种值得骄傲的标签。然而，在十七、十八世纪，西方人逐渐形成了一种态度，使得否认上帝的存在不仅成为可能，而且成为一种追求。他们会在科学中寻找支持自己观点的论据。然而，宗教改革家们所信奉的上帝似乎更青睐新兴的科学。由于他们相信上帝的绝对主权，路德和加尔文都否定了亚里士多德关于自然拥有内在力量的观点。他们认为自然如同基督徒一样被动，只能接受上帝的救赎恩赐，自身无能为力。加尔文明确赞扬了对自然世界的科学研究，因为在自然界中，不可见的上帝已经显现自身。科学与圣经之间不可能存在冲突：上帝在圣经中已经考虑到了人类的局限性，正如一位技艺精湛的演说家会根据听众的理解能力调整自己的思想和言辞一样。加尔文认为，创世记述是儿语（一种通俗易懂^的语言）的一个例子，它将复杂神秘的过程用简单易懂的方式呈现出来，使人人都能信奉上帝。46它不应按字面意思理解。

The term “atheist” was an insult. Nobody would have dreamed of calling himself an atheist. It was not yet a badge to be worn with pride. Yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people in the West would cultivate an attitude that would make the denial of God’s existence not only possible but desirable. They would find support for their views in science. Yet the God of the Reformers could be seen to favor the new science. Because they believed in the absolute sovereignty of God, Luther and Calvin had both rejected Aristotle’s view of nature as having intrinsic powers of its own. They believed that nature was as passive as the Christian, who could only accept the gift of salvation from God and could do nothing for himself. Calvin had explicitly commended the scientific study of the natural world in which the invisible God had made himself known. There could be no conflict between science and scripture: God had adapted himself to our human limitations in the Bible, just as a skillful speaker adjusts his thought and speech to the capacity of his audience. The account of Creation, Calvin believed, was an example of balbutive (baby talk), which accommodated complex and mysterious processes to the mentality of simple people so that everybody could have faith in God.⁴⁶ It was not to be taken literally.

然而，罗马天主教会并非一直如此开明。1530年，波兰天文学家尼古拉·哥白尼完成了他的著作《天体运行论》，该书宣称太阳是宇宙的中心。此书在他1543年去世前不久出版，并被教会列入禁书目录。1613年，比萨数学家伽利略·伽利莱声称他发明的望远镜证明了哥白尼体系的正确性。他的案件引起了轰动：伽利略被传唤到宗教裁判所，被迫放弃他的科学信条，并被判处无限期监禁。并非所有天主教徒都赞同这一判决，但在保守主义盛行的时期，罗马天主教会和其他任何机构一样，本能地反对变革。教会的特殊之处在于，它拥有强制推行其反对意见的权力，并且是一台运转流畅、高效地强制推行思想统一的机器。对伽利略的谴责不可避免地阻碍了天主教国家的科学研究，尽管早期许多杰出的科学家，如马兰·梅森、勒内·笛卡尔和布莱兹·帕斯卡，仍然忠于他们的天主教信仰。伽利略的案例错综复杂，我无意深入探讨其所有政治影响。然而，有一个事实在我们的讨论中至关重要：罗马天主教会谴责日心说并非因为它危及人们对造物主上帝的信仰，而是因为它与圣经中的上帝之言相悖。

The Roman Catholic Church had not always been as open-minded, however. In 1530 the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had completed his treatise De revolutionibus, which claimed that the sun was the center of the universe. It was published shortly before his death in 1543 and placed by the Church on the Index of Proscribed Books. In 1613 the Pisan mathematician Galileo Galilei claimed that the telescope he had invented proved that Copernicus’s system was correct. His case became a cause célèbre: summoned before the Inquisition, Galileo was commanded to retract his scientific creed and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. Not all Catholics agreed with this decision, but the Roman Catholic Church was as instinctively opposed to change as any other institution at this period when the conservative spirit prevailed. What made the Church different was that it had the power to enforce its opposition and was a smoothly running machine that had become horribly efficient in imposing intellectual conformity. Inevitably the condemnation of Galileo inhibited scientific study in Catholic countries, even though many distinguished scientists of the early period such as Marin Mersenne, René Descartes and Blaise Pascal remained loyal to their Catholic faith. The case of Galileo is complex and I do not intend to go into all its political ramifications. One fact emerges, however, that is important in our story: the Roman Catholic Church did not condemn the heliocentric theory because it endangered belief in God the Creator but because it contradicted the word of God in scripture.

在伽利略受审时，这也令许多新教徒感到不安。路德和加尔文都没有谴责哥白尼，但路德的同伴菲利普·梅兰希顿（1497-1560）却反对地球绕太阳运转的观点，因为它与《圣经》中的某些段落相冲突。这并非仅仅是新教徒的担忧。特伦托会议之后，天主教徒对他们自己的圣经——圣杰罗姆的拉丁文译本《武加大译本》——产生了新的热情。正如西班牙宗教裁判官莱昂·德·卡斯特罗在1576年所说：“任何与拉丁文《武加大译本》相悖的内容都不得更改，哪怕是一个句号、一个小小的结论、一个从句、一个词语、一个音节，甚至哪怕是微小的误差。” ⁴⁷过去，正如我们所见，一些理性主义者和神秘主义者刻意偏离对《圣经》和《古兰经》的字面解读，而倾向于一种刻意的象征性解释。如今，新教徒和天主教徒都开始完全按照字面意思理解圣经。伽利略和哥白尼的科学发现或许不会让伊斯玛仪派、苏菲派、卡巴拉派或静修派感到不安，但却给那些接受了新字面解释的天主教徒和新教徒带来了难题。地球绕太阳运转的理论如何与圣经中的经文相调和呢？例如：“世界也已定准，不能动摇”；“太阳升起，太阳落下，急速归回它升起的地方”；“他设立月亮定节令，太阳知道自己落下”？ ⁴⁸ 教会人士对伽利略的一些观点感到非常困惑。如果真如他所说，月球上可能存在生命，那么这些人怎么可能是亚当的后裔？他们又是如何从诺亚方舟中出来的呢？地球运动的理论如何与基督升天相符？圣经说天地是为了人类的利益而创造的。如果像伽利略所说的那样，地球只不过是绕太阳运转的一颗行星，这又如何能解释天地的创造呢？天堂和地狱被认为是真实存在的场所，在哥白尼的体系中很难确定它们的位置。例如，人们普遍认为地狱位于地球中心，正如但丁所描述的那样。新成立的信仰传播部就伽利略问题咨询了耶稣会学者罗伯特·贝拉明枢机主教的意见，他最终站在了传统的一边：“地狱是一个与坟墓不同的地下场所。”他得出结论，地狱必定位于地球中心，并以“自然理性”作为其最终论证的依据。

This also disturbed many Protestants at the time of Galileo’s trial. Neither Luther nor Calvin had condemned Copernicus, but Luther’s associate Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) rejected the idea of the earth’s motion around the sun because it was in conflict with certain, passages of the Bible. This was not just a Protestant concern. After the Council of Trent, Catholics had developed a new enthusiasm for their own Scripture: the Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible. In the words of the Spanish Inquisitor Leon of Castro in 1576: “Nothing may be changed that disagrees with the Latin edition of the Vulgate, be it a single period, a single little conclusion or a single clause, a single word of expression, a single syllable or one iota.”⁴⁷ In the past, as we have seen, some rationalists and mystics had gone out of their way to depart from a literal reading of the Bible and the Koran in favor of a deliberately symbolic interpretation. Now Protestants and Catholics had both begun to put their faith in an entirely literal understanding of scripture. The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts, but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new literalism. How could the theory that the earth moved round the sun be reconciled with the biblical verses: “The world also is established, that it cannot be moved”; “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down and hasteth to his place where he arose”; “He appointed the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down”?⁴⁸ Churchmen were highly disturbed by some of Galileo’s suggestions. If, as he said, there could be life on the moon, how could these men have descended from Adam and how had they got out of Noah’s Ark? How could the theory of the motion of the earth be squared with Christ’s ascension into heaven? Scripture said that the heavens and the earth had been created for man’s benefit. How could this be so if, as Galileo claimed, the earth was just another planet revolving around the sun? Heaven and Hell were regarded as real places, which it was difficult to locate in the Copernican system. Hell, for example, was widely believed to be situated at the center of the earth, where Dante had put it. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit scholar who was consulted on the Galileo question by the newly established Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, came down on the side of tradition: “Hell is a subterranean place distinct from the tombs.” He concluded that it must be at the center of the earth, basing his final argument on “natural reason”:

贝尔明的论点在今天听起来荒谬可笑。即使是最拘泥于字面教义的基督徒也不再认为地狱位于地球中心。但许多人却被其他一些科学理论所动摇，这些理论认为，在复杂的宇宙论中，“上帝没有容身之地”。

Bellarmine’s arguments sound farcical today. Even the most literal Christians no longer imagine that hell is at the center of the earth. But many have been shaken by other scientific theories that find “no room for God” in a sophisticated cosmology.

当穆拉·萨德拉教导穆斯林天堂和地狱位于每个人内心想象的世界中时，像贝拉明这样思想成熟的教会人士却极力主张它们具有实际的地理位置。与此同时，卡巴拉学者们也在重新诠释圣经。天主教徒和新教徒刻意以象征性的方式讲述创世故事，并告诫信徒不要字面理解这些神话，他们坚持认为《圣经》的每一个细节都是事实。这将使传统的宗教神话不堪一击，最终导致许多人彻底丧失对上帝的信仰。神学家们并没有为即将到来的挑战做好充分的准备。自宗教改革以来，新教徒和天主教徒对亚里士多德主义的热情高涨，他们开始像讨论其他客观事实一样讨论上帝。这最终使得18世纪末19世纪初的新兴“无神论者”得以彻底摒弃上帝。

At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail. This would make the traditional religious mythology vulnerable to the new science and would eventually make it impossible for many people to believe in God at all. The theologians were not preparing their people well for this approaching challenge. Since the Reformation and the new enthusiasm for Aristotelianism among Protestants and Catholics, they were beginning to discuss God as though he were any other objective fact. This would ultimately enable the new “atheists” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to get rid of God altogether.

因此，在鲁汶极具影响力的耶稣会神学家莱昂纳德·莱修斯（1554-1623）在其著作《神圣天意》中似乎表达了对哲学家之神的忠诚。这位神的存在可以像其他任何生活​​事实一样，通过科学手段加以证明。宇宙的设计并非偶然，它指向了第一推动者和维持者的存在。然而，莱修斯的神并无任何基督教特有的属性：他是一个科学事实，任何理性的人都可以发现。莱修斯几乎没有提及耶稣。他给人的印象是，神的存在可以从日常观察、哲学、比较宗教学研究和常识中推导出来。神已经沦为众多存在之一，如同西方科学家和哲学家开始探索的其他事物一样。费拉苏夫夫妇从未怀疑过他们证明上帝存在的论证的有效性，但他们的教友最终认定，哲学家们所信奉的上帝几乎没有任何宗教价值。托马斯·阿奎那或许给人一种印象，认为上帝不过是存在链条中众多环节之一——即便是最高级的环节——但他本人却确信，这些哲学论证与他在祈祷中体验到的神秘上帝毫无关联。然而到了十七世纪初，一些顶尖的神学家和教会人士仍然完全从理性的角度论证上帝的存在。许多人至今仍在这样做。当这些论证被新兴科学驳斥时，上帝本身的存在也受到了质疑。人们不再将上帝视为一种象征，象征着一个在通常意义上并不存在、只能通过祈祷和冥想等想象性修行才能发现的现实，而是越来越倾向于认为上帝仅仅是生活中一个客观存在的事实，与其他事实并无二致。从莱修斯这样的神学家身上我们可以看出，随着欧洲走向现代化，神学家们自己却在为未来的无神论者提供弹药。因为他们拒绝接受一个几乎没有宗教价值、只会给许多人带来恐惧而非希望和信仰的神。如同哲学家和科学家一样，宗教改革后的基督徒实际上已经抛弃了神秘主义者想象中的神，转而寻求理性之神的启迪。

Thus Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), the highly influential Jesuit theologian of Louvain, seems to give his allegiance to the God of the philosophers in his treatise The Divine Providence. The existence of this God can be demonstrated scientifically like any of the other facts of life. The design of the universe, which could not have happened by chance, points to the existence of a Prime Mover and Sustainer. There is nothing specifically Christian about Lessius’s God, however: he is a scientific fact who can be discovered by any rational human being. Lessius scarcely mentions Jesus. He gives the impression that the existence of God could be deduced from ordinary observation, philosophy, the study of comparative religion and common sense. God had become just another being, like the host of other objects that scientists and philosophers were beginning to explore in the West. The Faylasufs had not doubted the validity of their proofs for the existence of God, but their coreligionists had finally decided that this God of the philosophers had little religious value. Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item—albeit the highest—in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds. Many have continued to do so to the present day. When the arguments were disproved by the new science, the existence of God himself came under attack. Instead of seeing the idea of God as a symbol of a reality which had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation, it was increasingly assumed that God was simply a fact of life like any other. In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith. Like the philosophers and scientists, post-Reformation Christians had effectively abandoned the imaginative God of the mystics and sought enlightenment from the God of reason.

9.

启蒙

9

Enlightenment

B十六世纪末，西方开启了技术化的进程，这将催生一种截然不同的社会形态和一种全新的人性理想。这必然会影响西方对上帝角色和本质的认知。新兴工业化和高效化的西方所取得的成就也改变了世界历史的进程。奥伊库梅内（Oikumene）的其他国家发现，它们越来越难以像过去那样忽视西方世界，也难以与之达成共识。由于其他任何社会都从未取得过类似的成就，西方制造了全新的、因此也极其难以应对的问题。例如，直到十八世纪，伊斯兰教一直是非洲、中东和地中海地区的主导力量。尽管十五世纪的文艺复兴使西方基督教在某些方面超越了伊斯兰世界，但各个穆斯林政权却能够轻易地遏制这一挑战。奥斯曼帝国持续向欧洲扩张，穆斯林也勉强抵挡住了葡萄牙探险家及其后继商人的进攻。然而，到了十八世纪末，欧洲开始主宰世界，其成就的本质决定了世界其他地区根本无法追赶。英国也控制了印度，欧洲蓄势待发，准备尽可能地殖民世界。西化进程由此开启，随之而来的是宣称独立于上帝的世俗主义思潮。

BY THE END of the sixteenth century, the West had embarked on a process of technicalization that would produce an entirely different kind of society and a new ideal of humanity. Inevitably this would affect the Western perception of the role and nature of God. The achievements of the newly industrialized and efficient West also changed the course of world history. The other countries of the Oikumene found it increasingly difficult to ignore the Western world, as in the past when it had lagged behind the other major civilizations, or to come to terms with it. Because no other society had ever achieved anything similar, the West created problems that were entirely new and therefore very difficult to deal with. Until the eighteenth century, for example, Islam had been the dominant world power in Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean area. Even though its fifteenth-century Renaissance had put Western Christendom ahead of Islamdom in some respects, the various Muslim powers were easily able to contain the challenge. The Ottomans had continued to advance into Europe, and Muslims had been able to hold their own against the Portuguese explorers and the merchants who followed in their wake. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Europe had begun to dominate the world, and the very nature of its achievement meant that it was impossible for the rest of the world to catch up. The British had also gained control of India, and Europe was poised to colonize as much of the world as it could. The process of Westernization had begun and with it the cult of secularism that claimed independence of God.

现代技术社会包含哪些内容？此前所有文明都依赖农业。顾名思义，文明……城市曾是农业文明的摇篮，精英阶层依靠农民生产的剩余农产品生活，并拥有闲暇和资源来创造各种文化。对一神论的信仰在中东和欧洲的城市中发展起来，与其他主要宗教意识形态几乎同时出现。然而，所有这些农业文明都十分脆弱。它们依赖于作物、收成、气候和土壤侵蚀等诸多因素。随着每个帝国的扩张和责任的增加，最终都会耗尽其有限的资源。在达到权力巅峰之后，它们便开始走向不可避免的衰落和灭亡。然而，新兴的西方并不依赖农业。其技术上的精湛掌握使其摆脱了地域条件和外部时间变迁的束缚。资本的积累已融入经济资源之中，而这些资源——直到最近——似乎都是无限循环利用的。现代化进程使西方经历了一系列深刻的变革：它带来了工业化和随之而来的农业转型、思想上的“启蒙”以及政治和社会革命。这些巨大的变化自然影响了男女看待自己的方式，并促使他们重新审视自己与传统上称为“上帝”的终极现实之间的关系。

What did the modern technical society involve? All previous civilizations had depended upon agriculture. As its name implied, civilization had been the achievement of the cities, where an elite had lived upon the agricultural surplus produced by the peasantry and had the leisure and resources to create the various cultures. Belief in the One God had developed in the cities of the Middle East and in Europe at the same time as other major religious ideologies. All such agrarianate civilizations were vulnerable, however. They depended upon variables, such as crops, harvests climate and soil erosion. As each empire spread and increased its commitments and responsibilities, it ultimately outran its limited resources. After it had reached the zenith of its power, it began its inevitable decline and fall. The new West, however, was not dependent upon agriculture. Its technical mastery meant that it had become independent of local conditions and external, temporal reversals. The accumulation of capital had been built into the economic resources that—until recently—seemed to be indefinitely renewable. The process of modernization involved the West in a series of profound changes: it led to industrialization and a consequent transformation of agriculture, an intellectual “enlightenment” and political and social revolutions. Naturally these immense changes affected the way men and women perceived themselves and made them revise their relationship with the ultimate reality that they traditionally called “God.”

专业化对西方技术社会至关重要：经济、知识和社会领域的创新都需要不同领域的专业知识。例如，科学家依赖于仪器制造者效率的提高；工业需要新的机器和能源，以及来自科学的理论输入。各种专业相互交织，逐渐相互依存：一个专业领域启发了另一个领域，甚至启发了原本可能毫不相关的领域。这是一个累积的过程。一个专业领域的成果通过在另一个领域的应用而得到提升，这反过来又影响了该专业领域的效率。资本在持续发展的基础上被系统地再投资和增值。这些相互交织的变化获得了渐进且似乎不可阻挡的动力。越来越多的各阶层人士被卷入到越来越多的领域的现代化进程中。文明和文化成就不再是少数精英的专属，而是依赖于工厂工人、煤矿工人、印刷工人和职员，他们不仅是劳动者，也是不断扩张的市场中的消费者。最终，如果想要维持效率至上的原则，这些下层民众就必须识字，并在一定程度上分享社会财富。生产力的大幅提高和财富的积累资本和大众市场的扩张，以及科学领域的新进展，引发了社会革命：地主阶级的权力衰落，取而代之的是资产阶级的雄厚财力。这种新的效率也体现在社会组织方面，使西方逐渐赶上世界其他地区（如中国和奥斯曼帝国）的水平，并最终超越了它们。到1789年法国大革命爆发之年，公共服务的评判标准已转变为效率和效用。欧洲各国政府都意识到必须进行重组，并不断修订法律，以适应不断变化的现代社会状况。

Specialization was crucial to this Western technical society: all the innovations in the economic, intellectual and social fields demanded a particular expertise in many different fields. Scientists, for example, depended upon the increased efficiency of instrument-makers; industry demanded new machines and sources of energy, as well as theoretical input from science. The various specializations intermeshed and became gradually interdependent: one inspired another in a different and perhaps hitherto unrelated field. It was an accumulative process. The achievements of one specialization were increased by their usage in another, and this in turn affected its own efficiency. Capital was systematically reinvested and multiplied on the basis of continued development. The interlocking changes acquired a progressive and apparently unstoppable momentum. More and more people of all ranks were drawn into the process of modernization in an increasing number of spheres. Civilization and cultural achievement were no longer the preserve of a tiny elite but depended upon factory workers, coal miners, printers and clerks, not only as laborers but also as buyers in the ever-expanding market. Ultimately it would become necessary for these lower orders to become literate and to share—to some degree—in the wealth of society if the overriding need for efficiency was to be preserved. The great increase in productivity, the accumulation of capital and the expansion of mass markets, as well as the new intellectual advances in science, led to social revolution: the power of the landed gentry declined and was replaced by the financial muscle of the bourgeoisie. The new efficiency was also felt in matters of social organization, which gradually brought the West up to the standards already achieved in other parts of the world, such as China and the Ottoman empire, and then enabled it to surpass them. By 1789, the year of the French Revolution, public service was judged by its effectiveness and utility. The various governments in Europe found it necessary to reconstitute themselves and engage in a continuous revision of their laws in order to meet the ever-changing conditions of modernity.

在旧有的农业社会体制下，这简直是不可想象的，因为那时法律被视为不可更改的神圣法则。这标志着技术化给西方社会带来了新的自主权：人们感到自己前所未有地掌控着自己的事务。我们已经看到，在传统社会中，创新和变革引发了人们的深深恐惧，因为文明被视为脆弱的成就，任何与过去延续性的断裂都会遭到抵制。然而，西方引入的现代技术社会却建立在对持续发展和进步的预期之上。变革被制度化，并被视为理所当然。事实上，像伦敦皇家学会这样的机构致力于收集新知识以取代旧知识。各个科学领域的专家被鼓励汇集他们的研究成果，以促进这一进程。新的科学机构不再将他们的发现秘而不宣，而是希望传播知识，以促进自身及其他领域的未来发展。因此，西方已经取代了旧有的保守主义精神，取而代之的是对变革的渴望和对持续发展可行性的信念。与过去担心年轻一代生活水平下降不同，老一辈人期望子女的生活比自己更好。历史研究被一种新的神话所主导：进步神话。它取得了巨大的成就，但如今环境破坏让我们意识到，这种生活方式与旧方式一样脆弱，我们或许开始明白，它和几个世纪以来激励人类的其他大多数神话一样，都是虚构的。

This would have been unthinkable under the old agrarianate dispensation, when law was regarded as immutable and divine. It was a sign of the new autonomy that technicalization was bringing to Western society: men and women felt that they were in charge of their own affairs as never before. We have seen the profound fear that innovation and change had unleashed in traditional societies, where civilization was felt to be a fragile achievement and any break in continuity with the past was resisted. The modern technical society introduced by the West, however, was based upon the expectation of constant development and progress. Change was institutionalized and taken for granted. Indeed, such institutions as the Royal Society in London were dedicated to the collection of new knowledge to replace the old. Specialists in the various sciences were encouraged to pool their findings to aid this process. Instead of keeping their discoveries secret, the new scientific institutions wanted to disseminate knowledge in order to advance future growth in their own and other fields. The old conservative spirit of the Oikumene, therefore, had been replaced in the West by a desire for change and a belief that continual development was practicable. Instead of fearing that the younger generation was going to the dogs, as in former times, the older generation expected their children to live better than they. The study of history was dominated by a new myth: that of Progress. It achieved great things, but now that damage to the environment has made us realize that this way of life is as vulnerable as the old, we are, perhaps, beginning to grasp that it is as fictitious as most of the other mythologies that have inspired humanity over the centuries.

资源共享和科学发现虽然将人们联系在一起，但新的专业化分工不可避免地在其他方面使他们分道扬镳。此前，知识分子有可能掌握各个领域的知识。例如，穆斯林学者费拉苏夫家族就精通……医学、哲学和美学。事实上，《哲学论》（Falsafah）为它的信徒们提供了一个连贯而全面的理论框架，阐述了当时人们所认为的全部现实。到了十七世纪，西方社会日渐显著的专业化进程开始显现。天文学、化学和几何学等各个学科开始变得独立自主。最终，在今天，一个领域的专家不可能在其他领域也拥有任何能力。因此，每一位重要的知识分子都认为自己是开拓者而非传统的守护者。他们是探险家，就像那些探索地球新领域的航海家一样。他们为了社会的利益，勇于涉足此前未知的领域。那些发挥想象力，开辟新天地，并在这一过程中推翻旧有观念的创新者，成为了文化英雄。随着人类对自然界的掌控力突飞猛进，曾经令人类受制于自然的掌控力似乎得到了极大的提升，人们对人类的未来充满了新的乐观。人们开始相信，更好的教育和更完善的法律能够启迪人类的精神。这种对人类自身潜能的全新信心，意味着人们开始相信，他们可以通过自身的努力获得启迪。他们不再觉得需要依赖世代相传的传统、某个机构或精英阶层，甚至不需要神的启示来发现真理。

While the pooling of resources and discoveries drew people together, the new specialization inevitably pulled them apart in other ways. Hitherto it had been possible for an intellectual to keep abreast of knowledge on all fronts. The Muslim Faylasufs, for example, had been proficient in medicine, philosophy and aesthetics. Indeed, Falsafah had offered its disciples a coherent and inclusive account of what was believed to be the whole of reality. By the seventeenth century, the process of specialization that would become so marked a feature of Western society was beginning to make itself felt. The various disciplines of astronomy, chemistry and geometry were beginning to become independent and autonomous. Ultimately in our own day it would be impossible for an expert in one field to feel any competence whatever in another. It followed that every major intellectual saw himself less as a conserver of tradition than as a pioneer. He was an explorer, like the navigators who had penetrated to new parts of the globe. He was venturing into hitherto uncharted realms for the sake of his society. The innovator who made such an effort of imagination to break new ground and, in the process, overthrow old sanctities, became a cultural hero. There was new optimism about humanity as control over the natural world, which had once held mankind in thrall, appeared to advance in leaps and bounds. People began to believe that better education and improved laws could bring light to the human spirit. This new confidence in the natural powers of human beings meant that people came to believe that they could achieve enlightenment by means of their own exertions. They no longer felt that they needed to rely on inherited tradition, an institution or an elite—or, even, a revelation from God—to discover the truth.

然而，专业化的经验意味着参与专业化过程的人们越来越难以看到全貌。因此，富有创新精神的科学家和知识分子感到有义务从零开始，构建他们自己的生命和宗教理论。他们认为，自身知识和能力的提升赋予了他们重新审视传统基督教对现实的解释并使其与时俱进的责任。新的科学精神是经验主义的，完全基于观察和实验。我们已经看到，旧有的理性主义（法尔萨法）依赖于对理性宇宙的最初信仰。西方科学不能再这样想当然，先驱者们越来越愿意承担犯错的风险，甚至推翻既定的权威和机构，例如《圣经》、教会和基督教传统。旧有的上帝存在的“证明”已不再完全令人满意，充满经验方法热情的自然科学家和哲学家感到有义务以证明其他可验证现象的方式来验证上帝的客观存在。

Yet the experience of specialization meant that people involved in the process of specialization were increasingly unable to see the whole picture. Consequently innovative scientists and intellectuals felt obliged to work out their own theories of life and religion, starting from scratch. They felt that their own enhanced knowledge and effectiveness gave them the duty to look again at the traditional Christian explanations of reality and bring them up to date. The new scientific spirit was empirical, based solely on observation and experiment. We have seen that the old rationalism of Falsafah had depended upon an initial act of faith in a rational universe. The Western sciences could take nothing for granted in this way, and the pioneers were increasingly ready to risk a mistake or knock down established authorities and institutions such as the Bible, the Church and the Christian tradition. The old “proofs” for God’s existence were no longer entirely satisfactory, and natural scientists and philosophers, full of enthusiasm for the empirical method, felt compelled to verify the objective reality of God in the same way as they proved other demonstrable phenomena.

无神论仍然被视为令人憎恶的。正如我们将看到的，大多数启蒙运动时期的哲学家们普遍相信上帝的存在。然而，一些人开始意识到，即使是上帝的存在也并非理所当然。或许最早意识到这一点并认真对待无神论的人之一，便是法国物理学家、数学家和神学家布莱兹·帕斯卡（1623-1662）。他体弱多病，却早慧过人。由于身为科学家的父亲的缘故，他被单独关起来，与世隔绝，由父亲亲自教导。他的父亲发现，年仅十一岁的帕斯卡竟然秘密地推导出了欧几里得几何的前二十三条命题。十六岁时，他发表了一篇几何学论文，就连笛卡尔这样的科学家都难以置信，如此年轻的人竟能写出如此精彩的文章。后来，他还发明了计算机器、气压计和液压机。帕斯卡一家并非虔诚的信徒，但在1646年，他们皈依了詹森主义。布莱斯的妹妹杰奎琳进入了位于巴黎西南部的詹森派修道院——皇家港修道院，并成为该天主教教派最热情的拥护者之一。1654年11月23日晚，布莱斯本人经历了一次宗教体验，从“晚上十点半左右一直持续到午夜后半小时左右”，这次体验让他意识到自己的信仰过于疏离和学院派。他去世后，人们发现他缝在双排扣上衣里的“纪念文”记录了这次启示。

Atheism was still felt to be abhorrent. As we shall see, most of the philosophes of the Enlightenment believed implicitly in the existence of a God. Yet a few people were beginning to see that not even God could be taken for granted. Perhaps one of the first people to appreciate this and to take atheism seriously was the French physicist, mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal (1623–62). A sickly, precocious child, he had been closeted from other children and educated by his scientist father, who discovered that the eleven-year-old Blaise had secretly worked out for himself the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid. At sixteen, he had published a paper on geometry which scientists like René Descartes refused to believe could have been written by one so young. Later he devised a calculating machine, a barometer and a hydraulic press. The Pascals were not a particularly devout family, but in 1646 they had been converted to Jansenism. Blaise’s sister, Jacqueline, entered the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal in southwest Paris and became one of the Catholic sect’s most passionate advocates. On the night of November 23, 1654, Blaise himself had a religious experience which lasted “from about half-past ten in the evening till about half an hour after midnight” and which showed him that his faith had been too remote and academic. After his death, his “Memorial” of this revelation was found stitched into his doublet:

这种本质上带有神秘色彩的体验意味着帕斯卡的上帝与我们在本章将要讨论的其他科学家和哲学家的上帝截然不同。这并非哲学家们所信奉的上帝，而是启示之神。他皈依基督教的巨大力量促使他与詹森主义者站在一起，对抗他们的主要敌人——耶稣会士。

This essentially mystical experience meant that the God of Pascal was different from the God of the other scientists and philosophers we shall consider in this chapter. This was not the God of the philosophers but the God of revelation, and the overwhelming power of his conversion led Pascal to throw in his lot with the Jansenists against the Jesuits, their chief enemies.

伊格内修斯认为世界充满了上帝，并鼓励人们……耶稣会士致力于培养人们对神圣无所不在和无所不能的感知，而帕斯卡和詹森主义者则认为世界荒凉空虚，缺乏神性。尽管帕斯卡有所启示，但他的上帝仍然是“隐秘的上帝”，无法通过理性证明来发现。《思想录》（Pensées）是帕斯卡关于宗教问题的随笔，于1669年在他去世后出版，其根源在于他对人类境况的深刻悲观。人类的“卑劣”是一个永恒的主题；^即使是基督也无法减轻这种卑劣，“他将在痛苦中直到世界末日”。这种荒凉感和上帝令人恐惧的缺席感构成了新欧洲灵性的大部分特征。《思想录》的持续流行表明，帕斯卡较为阴郁的灵性以及他所描绘的隐秘的上帝触动了西方宗教意识中某种至关重要的东西。

Where Ignatius had seen the world as full of God and had encouraged Jesuits to cultivate a sense of the divine omnipresence and omnipotence, Pascal and the Jansenists found the world to be bleak and empty, bereft of divinity. Despite his revelation, Pascal’s God remains “a hidden God” who cannot be discovered by means of rational proof. The Pensées, Pascal’s jottings on religious matters, which were published posthumously in 1669, are rooted in a profound pessimism about the human condition. Human “vileness” is a constant theme; it cannot even be alleviated by Christ, “who will be in agony until the end of the world.”² The sense of desolation and of God’s terrifying absence characterizes much of the spirituality of the new Europe. The continuing popularity of the Pensées shows that Pascal’s darker spirituality and his hidden God appealed to something vital in the Western religious consciousness.

因此，帕斯卡的科学成就并没有让他对人类的境况抱有太大的信心。当他思考宇宙的浩瀚无垠时，他感到无比恐惧。

Pascal’s scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:

这提醒我们，不应将科学时代的乐观主义一概而论。帕斯卡能够预见到一个似乎空无终极意义或价值的世界所带来的彻底恐怖。那种在陌生世界中醒来的恐惧，一直萦绕着人类，而帕斯卡对此的表达也极为精辟。帕斯卡对自己极其坦诚；与大多数同时代的人不同，他坚信没有办法证明上帝的存在。当他设想自己与一个天生无法相信的人辩论时，帕斯卡找不到任何论据来说服对方。这在单一神论的历史上是一个全新的发展。此前，没有人认真质疑过上帝的存在。帕斯卡是第一个承认，在这个勇敢的新世界里，对上帝的信仰只能是个人选择的人。在这方面，他是第一个现代人。

This is a salutary reminder that we should not generalize about the buoyant optimism of the scientific age. Pascal could envisage the full horror of a world that seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance. The terror of waking up in an alien world, which had always haunted humanity, has rarely been more eloquently expressed. Pascal was brutally honest with himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that there was no way of proving the existence of God. When he imagined himself arguing with somebody who was constitutionally unable to believe, Pascal could find no arguments to convince him. This was a new development in the history of monotheism. Hitherto nobody had seriously questioned the existence of God. Pascal was the first person to concede that, in this brave new world, belief in God could only be a matter of personal choice. In this, he was the first modern.

帕斯卡对上帝存在问题的研究方法具有革命性的意义，但从未被任何教会正式接受。总的来说，基督教护教士更倾向于莱昂纳德·莱修斯（Leonard Lessius）的理性主义方法，这在上一章结尾处有所讨论。然而，这种方法只能引向哲学家们眼中的上帝，而非帕斯卡所经历的启示之神。他坚持认为，信仰并非基于常识的理性认同，而是一种赌博。我们无法证明上帝的存在，理性也无法证伪他的存在：“我们既无法知道[上帝]是什么，也无法知道他是否存在……理性​​无法解答这个问题。无限的混沌将我们隔开。在这无限距离的尽头，一枚硬币正在旋转，最终会正面或反面朝上。你会如何下注？” ^⁴然而，这种赌博并非完全非理性。选择上帝是一种双赢的方案。帕斯卡继续说道，选择相信上帝，风险是有限的，而收益却是无限的。随着基督徒信仰的深入，他或她会逐渐领悟到一种持续的启迪，一种对上帝临在的觉知，这正是得救的确切标志。依赖外在权威是无济于事的；每个基督徒都必须依靠自己。

Pascal’s approach to the problem of God’s existence is revolutionary in its implications, but it has never been accepted officially by any church. In general, Christian apologists have preferred the rationalistic approach of Leonard Lessius, discussed at the end of the last chapter. Such an approach, however, could only lead to the God of the philosophers, not to the God of revelation experienced by Pascal. Faith, he insisted, was not a rational assent based on common sense. It was a gamble. It was impossible to prove that God exists but equally impossible for reason to disprove his existence: “We are incapable of knowing either what [God] is or whether he is.… Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager?”⁴ This gamble is not entirely irrational, however. To opt for God is a win-win solution. In choosing to believe in God, Pascal continued, the risk is finite but the gain infinite. As the Christian progresses in the Faith, he or she will become aware of a continuous enlightenment, an awareness of God’s presence that is a sure sign of salvation. It is no good relying on external authority; each Christian is on his own.

帕斯卡的悲观主义在《思想录》中逐渐被一种日益清晰的认识所抵消：一旦做出承诺，隐秘的上帝就会向所有寻求他的人显现。帕斯卡借上帝之口说道：“若非已经找到我，你又怎会寻求我呢？” ^⁵诚然，人类无法凭借论证和逻辑，也无法通过接受教会的教义来抵达遥远的上帝面前。但通过个人选择臣服于上帝，信徒会感到自身发生了转变，变得“忠诚、诚实、谦卑、感恩、充满善行、真诚的朋友”。⁶^基督徒会发现，在面对虚无和绝望时，他们创造了信仰，构建了对上帝的认知，生命也因此获得了意义和价值。上帝是真实存在的，因为他行事。信仰并非理智上的确定性，而是纵身跃入黑暗，体验道德的启迪。

Pascal’s pessimism is countered by a growing realization in the Pensées that once the wager has been made, the hidden God reveals himself to anyone who seeks him. Pascal makes God say: “You would not seek me, if you had not already found me.”⁵ True, humanity cannot batter its way to the distant God by arguments and logic or by accepting the teaching of an institutional church. But by making the personal decision to surrender to God, the faithful feel themselves transformed, becoming “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a true friend.”⁶ Somehow the Christian will find that life has acquired meaning and significance, having created faith and constructed a sense of God in the face of meaninglessness and despair. God is a reality because he works. Faith is not intellectual certainty but a leap into the dark and an experience that brings a moral enlightenment.

勒内·笛卡尔（1596-1650）是新时代的代表人物之一，他对心灵发现上帝的能力抱有更大的信心。事实上，他坚持认为，唯有理智才能为我们提供所寻求的确定性。他不会赞同帕斯卡的打赌，因为那完全基于主观经验，尽管他自己对上帝存在的论证也依赖于另一种主观性。他急于反驳法国散文家米歇尔·蒙田（1533-1592）的怀疑论，蒙田否认任何事物是确定的，甚至否认任何事物是可能的。笛卡尔是一位数学家，也是一位虔诚的天主教徒，他感到自己肩负着一项使命，那就是将新的经验理性主义应用于对抗这种怀疑论的斗争。与莱修斯一样，笛卡尔认为唯有理性才能说服人类。接受宗教和道德真理，他认为这是文明的基石。信仰告诉我们的，并非任何无法用理性证明的东西：圣保罗在《罗马书》第一章中就曾如此断言：“因为神的事情，人所能知道的，原是明明白白的，因为神自己已经把它显明了。自从神创造世界以来，他永恒的能力和神性——尽管不可见——就存在于他所创造的万物之中，供人所感知。” ⁷笛卡尔进一步论证，与世间万物相比，人们更容易、更确定地认识神（facilius et certius）。这在某种程度上与帕斯卡的赌注一样具有革命性，尤其因为笛卡尔的论证否定了保罗提出的外部世界的见证，而支持心灵的内省，即心灵向内审视自身。

René Descartes (1596–1650), another of the new men, had far more confidence in the ability of the mind to discover God. Indeed, he insisted that the intellect alone could provide us with the certainty we seek. He would not have approved of Pascal’s wager, since it was based on a purely subjective experience, though his own demonstration of the existence of God depended upon another type of subjectivity. He was anxious to refute the skepticism of the French essayist Michel Montaigne (1533–92), who had denied that anything was certain or even probable. Descartes, a mathematician and a convinced Catholic, felt that he had a mission to bring the new empirical rationalism to the fight against such skepticism. Like Lessius, Descartes thought that reason alone could persuade humanity to accept the truths of religion and morality, which he saw as the foundation of civilization. Faith told us nothing that could not be demonstrated rationally: St. Paul himself had asserted as much in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans: “For what can be known about God is perfectly plain to [mankind] since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things that he has made.”⁷ Descartes went on to argue that God could be known more easily and certainly (facilius et certius) than any of the other things in existence. This was as revolutionary in its own way as Pascal’s wager, especially since Descartes’s proof rejected the witness of the external world that Paul had put forward in favor of the reflexive introspection of the mind turning in upon itself.

笛卡尔运用他那套逻辑严密、循序渐进地推导出最简单或第一原理的普世数学的经验方法，试图建立一个同样严谨的分析论证来证明上帝的存在。但与亚里士多德、圣保罗以及所有先前的一神论哲学家不同，他认为宇宙完全没有神。自然界中没有任何设计。事实上，宇宙是混沌的，没有丝毫智能规划的迹象。因此，我们不可能从自然界推导出任何关于第一原理的确定性。笛卡尔不屑于考虑概率或可能性：他寻求的是数学所能提供的那种确定性。这种确定性也可以存在于简单而自明的命题中，例如：“覆水难收”，这句命题无可辩驳地正确。因此，当他坐在柴炉旁冥想时，他想到了那句著名的格言：我思故我在。与十二个世纪前的奥古斯丁一样，笛卡尔也在人类意识中发现了上帝存在的证据：甚至怀疑本身也证明了怀疑者的存在！我们无法确定外部世界的任何事物，但我们却可以确定我们自身的内在体验。笛卡尔的论证实际上是对安瑟伦本体论证明的重新阐释。当我们产生怀疑时，自我的局限性和有限性便显露出来。然而，如果我们没有预先存在的“完美”概念，我们就无法理解“不完美”的概念。与安瑟伦一样，笛卡尔得出结论：不存在的完美本身就是自相矛盾的。因此，我们对怀疑的体验告诉我们，一位至高无上、完美无缺的存在——上帝——必然存在。

Using the empirical method of his universal Mathematics, which had progressed logically toward the simples or first principles, Descartes attempted to establish an equally analytic demonstration of God’s existence. But unlike Aristotle, St. Paul and all previous monotheistic philosophers, he found the cosmos completely Godless. There was no design in nature. In fact the universe was chaotic and revealed no sign of intelligent planning. It was impossible for us to deduce any certainty about first principles from nature, therefore. Descartes had no time for the probable or the possible: he sought to establish the kind of certainty that mathematics could provide. It could also be found in simple and self-evident propositions, such as: “What’s done cannot be undone,” which was irrefutably true. Accordingly, while he was sitting meditating beside a wood stove, he hit upon the famous maxim: Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. Like Augustine, some twelve centuries earlier, Descartes found evidence of God in human consciousness: even doubt proved the existence of the doubter! We cannot be certain of anything in the external world, but we can be certain of our own inner experience. Descartes’s argument turns out to be a reworking of Anselm’s Ontological Proof. When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed. Yet we could not arrive at the idea of “imperfection” if we did not have a prior conception of “perfection.” Like Anselm, Descartes concluded that a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in terms. Our experience of doubt, therefore, tells us that a supreme and perfect being—God—must exist.

笛卡尔继续从上帝存在的“证明”中推导出关于上帝本质的事实，其方式与他进行数学论证的方式非常相似。正如他在《方法论》中所说，“上帝，这位完美的存在，其存在至少与任何其他事物的存在一样确定无疑。”几何学的论证或许可以如此。” ⁸正如欧几里得三角形的内角和必须等于两个直角一样，笛卡尔的完美存在也必须具备某些属性。我们的经验告诉我们，世界具有客观实在性，而一位完美的上帝，必然是诚实的，不可能欺骗我们。因此，笛卡尔并没有用世界来证明上帝的存在，而是用上帝的观念来赋予自己对世界实在性的信仰。在某种程度上，笛卡尔和帕斯卡一样，都感到与世界疏离。他的思想没有向世界敞开，而是退缩到自身之中。尽管上帝的观念赋予了人对自身存在的确定性，因此对笛卡尔的认识论至关重要，但笛卡尔的方法揭示了一种孤立和一种自主的形象，而这种形象在20世纪成为了西方人形象的核心。与世界的疏离和骄傲的自立使得许多人拒绝接受上帝的概念，因为上帝会将人贬低到依赖的状态。

Descartes went on to deduce facts about the nature of God from this “proof” of his existence, in much the same way as he had conducted mathematical demonstrations. As he said in his Discourse on Method, “it is at least as certain that God, who is this perfect being, is or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can possibly be.”⁸ Just as a Euclidian triangle must have angles that add up to two right angles, Descartes’s perfect being had to have certain attributes. Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descartes had used the idea of God to give him faith in the reality of the world. In his own way, Descartes felt as alienated from the world as Pascal. Instead of reaching out toward the world, his mind recoils upon itself. Even though the idea of God gives man certainty about his own existence and is, therefore, essential to Descartes’s epistemology, the Cartesian method reveals an isolation and an image of autonomy that would become central to the Western image of man in our own century. Alienation from the world and a proud self-reliance would lead many people to reject the whole idea of a God who reduces a man or woman to the condition of a dependent.

从一开始，宗教就帮助人们与世界建立联系，并在其中扎根。对圣地的崇拜先于一切对世界的思考，帮助人们在令人敬畏的宇宙中找到精神寄托。对自然力量的神化表达了人类对世界由来已久的惊奇和敬畏。即使是奥古斯丁，尽管他饱受精神折磨，也依然认为世界是一个充满奇妙之美的地方。笛卡尔的哲学建立在奥古斯丁的内省传统之上，他却对惊奇毫无兴趣。他认为神秘感必须不惜一切代价避免，因为它代表了一种文明人早已超越的原始心智状态。在他的著作《流星》的引言中，他解释说，我们“对高于我们的事物比对我们同等或低于我们的事物更感兴趣”是人之常情。^因此，诗人画家们将云朵描绘成上帝的宝座，想象上帝亲手将露水洒在云朵上，或将闪电掷向岩石：

From the very beginning, religion had helped people to relate to the world and to root themselves in it. The cult of the holy place had preceded all other reflection upon the world and helped men and women to find a focus in a terrifying universe. The deification of the natural forces had expressed the wonder and awe which had always been part of the human response to the world. Even Augustine had found the world a place of wondrous beauty, despite his anguished spirituality. Descartes, whose philosophy was based on the Augustinian tradition of introspection, had no time at all for wonder. A sense of mystery was to be avoided at all costs because it represented a primitive state of mind that civilized man had outgrown. In the introduction to his treatise Les météores, he explained that it was natural for us to “have more admiration for the things above us than for those on our level or below.”⁹ Poets and painters had, therefore, depicted the clouds as God’s throne, had imagined God sprinkling dew upon the clouds or hurling lightning against the rocks with his own hand:

笛卡尔将云、风、露水和闪电解释为纯粹的物理现象，正如他所解释的，这样做是为了消除“任何惊奇的理由”。 ¹⁰然而，笛卡尔的上帝，正是哲学家们的上帝。他全然不顾世俗之事。他的显现并非体现在圣经所记载的神迹中，而是体现在他所制定的永恒法则中：《流星雨》也解释说，古代以色列人在旷野中吃的吗哪其实是一种露水。由此便产生了一种荒谬的护教论，试图通过为各种神迹和神话寻找合理的解释来“证明”圣经的真实性。例如，耶稣喂饱五千人的神迹被解读为他羞辱在场众人，让他们拿出偷偷带来的野餐食物并分发。这种论证虽然出发点是好的，却忽略了象征意义，而象征意义正是圣经叙事的精髓所在。

Descartes would explain clouds, winds, dew and lightning as mere physical events in order, as he explained, to remove “any cause to marvel.”¹⁰ The God of Descartes, however, was the God of the philosophers who took no cognizance of earthly events. He was revealed not in the miracles described in scripture but in the eternal laws that he had ordained: Les météores also explained that the manna that had fed the ancient Israelites in the desert was a kind of dew. Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to “prove” the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around. Well-intentioned as it is, this kind of argument misses the point of the symbolism that is of the essence of biblical narrative.

笛卡尔始终恪守罗马天主教的教规，并自视为正统基督徒。他认为信仰与理性之间并不矛盾。在他的著作《方法论》中，他论证了存在一种体系，能够使人类获得一切真理。没有什么真理是它无法企及的。在任何学科中，只需运用这种方法，就能构建出一套可靠的知识体系，从而驱散一切迷茫和无知。神秘主义已然沦为混乱，此前理性主义者小心翼翼地将上帝与其他一切现象区分开来，而如今上帝却被纳入了人类的思想体系之中。在宗教改革的教义动荡之前，神秘主义在欧洲尚未真正扎根。因此，这种以神秘和神话为基础，并如其名称所示与它们紧密相连的灵性，对许多西方基督徒而言是陌生的。即使在笛卡尔的教会中，神秘主义者也十分罕见，且常常受到怀疑。神秘主义者的上帝依赖于宗教体验而存在，这与笛卡尔这样的人截然不同，因为笛卡尔认为沉思纯粹是理性的活动。

Descartes was always careful to submit to the rulings of the Roman Catholic Church and saw himself as an orthodox Christian. He saw no contradiction between faith and reason. In his treatise Discourse on Method, he argued that there was a system that would enable humanity to reach all truth. Nothing lay beyond its grasp. All that was necessary—in any discipline—was to apply the method and it would then be possible to piece together a reliable body of knowledge that would disperse all confusion and ignorance. Mystery had become muddle, and the God whom previous rationalists had been careful to separate from all other phenomena had now been contained within a human system of thought. Mysticism had not really had time to take root in Europe before the dogmatic convulsions of the Reformation. Thus the type of spirituality that thrives upon mystery and mythology and is, as its name implies, deeply connected with them was strange to many Christians in the West. Even in Descartes’s church, mystics were rare and often suspect. The God of the mystics, whose existence depended upon religious experience, was quite alien to a man like Descartes, for whom contemplation meant purely cerebral activity.

英国物理学家艾萨克·牛顿（1642-1727）同样将上帝纳入他自己的机械体系，他也同样渴望消除基督教的神秘性。他的出发点是力学而非数学，因为科学家必须先学会精确地画圆，才能掌握几何学。与笛卡尔按顺序证明了自我、上帝和自然世界的存在不同，牛顿首先尝试解释物理宇宙，并将上帝视为该体系不可或缺的一部分。在牛顿的物理学中，自然完全是被动的：上帝是唯一的活动源泉。因此，正如亚里士多德所言，上帝仅仅是自然物理秩序的延续。在他的巨著《哲学论》中，他进一步阐述了这一观点。在《自然哲学的原理》（1687年）一书中，牛顿试图用数学术语描述各种天体和地球物体之间的关系，从而建立一个连贯而全面的体系。牛顿引入的万有引力概念将他体系的各个组成部分联系在一起。万有引力概念冒犯了一些科学家，他们指责牛顿回归了亚里士多德关于物质吸引力的观点。这种观点与新教关于上帝绝对主权的观念相悖。牛顿否认了这一点：一位至高无上的上帝是他整个体系的核心，因为如果没有这样一位神圣的“机械论者”，这个体系就无法存在。

The English physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who also reduced God to his own mechanical system, was equally anxious to rid Christianity of mystery. His starting point was mechanics, not mathematics, because a scientist had to learn to draw a circle accurately before he could master geometry. Unlike Descartes, who had proved the existence of the self, God and the natural world in that order, Newton began with an attempt to explain the physical universe, with God as an essential part of the system. In Newton’s physics, nature was entirely passive: God was the sole source of activity. Thus, as in Aristotle, God was simply a continuation of the natural, physical order. In his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia (The Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687), Newton wanted to describe the relations between the various celestial and terrestrial bodies in mathematical terms in such a way as to create a coherent and comprehensive system. The notion of gravitational force, which Newton introduced, drew the component parts of his system together. The notion of gravity offended some scientists, who accused Newton of reverting to Aristotle’s idea of the attractive powers of matter. Such a view was incompatible with the Protestant idea of the absolute sovereignty of God. Newton denied this: a sovereign God was central to his whole system, for without such a divine Mechanick it would not exist.

与帕斯卡和笛卡尔不同，牛顿在思考宇宙时，坚信自己找到了上帝存在的证据。为什么天体的内部引力没有将它们全部拉拢成一个巨大的球体呢？因为它们被精心分布在无限的空间中，彼此之间保持着足够的距离，从而避免了这种情况的发生。正如他向圣保罗大教堂院长理查德·本特利解释的那样，如果没有一位智慧的神圣监督者，这一切都是不可能的：“我认为这无法用单纯的自然原因来解释，我不得不将其归因于一位意志坚定的造物主的谋划和安排。”^一个月后，他又写信给本特利：“引力或许能让行星运动，但如果没有神力，它永远无法使行星像现在这样围绕太阳运行。因此，基于这个原因以及其他原因，我不得不将这个系统的运行归因于一位智慧的造物主。” ¹²例如，如果地球自转速度不是每小时一千英里而是每小时一百英里，那么夜晚就会延长十倍，地球也会冷到无法维持生命；漫长的白昼里，酷热会将所有植物烤干。如此完美地设计这一切的存在，必定是一位拥有超凡智慧的机械师。

Unlike Pascal and Descartes, when Newton contemplated the universe he was convinced that he had proof of God’s existence. Why had the internal gravity of the celestial bodies not pulled them all together into one huge spherical mass? Because they had been carefully disposed throughout infinite space with sufficient distance between them to prevent this. As he explained to his friend Richard Bentley, Dean of St. Paul’s, this would have been impossible without an intelligent divine Overseer: “I do not think it explicable by mere natural causes but am forced to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent.”¹¹ A month later he wrote to Bentley again: “Gravity may put ye planets into motion but without ye divine power it could never put them into such a Circulating motion as they have about ye Sun, and therefore, for this as well as other reasons, I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this Systeme to an intelligent Agent.”¹² If, for example, the earth revolved on its axis at only one hundred miles per hour instead of one thousand miles per hour, night would be ten times longer and the world would be too cold to sustain life; during the long day, the heat would shrivel all the vegetation. The Being which had contrived all this so perfectly had to be a supremely intelligent Mechanick.

除了智慧之外，这位“代理人”还必须拥有足够的力量来驾驭如此庞大的群体。牛顿得出结论：驱动无限而复杂的系统运转的原始力量是支配（dominatio），唯有支配才能解释宇宙的存在，并使上帝具有神性。牛津大学首位阿拉伯语教授爱德华·波科克曾告诉牛顿，拉丁语“ deus”源自阿拉伯语“du” （主）。因此，支配才是上帝的本质属性，而非笛卡尔论述上帝时所着重探讨的完美性。在《原理》的结尾“总论”（General Scholium）中，牛顿从上帝的智慧和力量推导出了上帝所有传统的属性：

Besides being intelligent, this Agent had to be powerful enough to manage these great masses. Newton concluded that the primal force which had set the infinite and intricate system in motion was dominatio (dominion), which alone accounted for the universe and made God divine. Edward Pococke, the first professor of Arabic at Oxford, had told Newton that the Latin deus derived from the Arabic du (Lord). Dominion, therefore, was God’s essential attribute rather than the perfection which had been the starting point for Descartes’s discussion of God. In the “General Scholium” which concludes the Principia, Newton deduced all God’s traditional attributes from his intelligence and power:

牛顿并未提及《圣经》：我们只能通过观察世界来认识上帝。此前，创世论表达的是一种精神真理：它进入犹太教和基督教的时间较晚，而且一直以来都存在一些问题。如今，新兴科学将创世论推到了中心位置，并使对创世论的字面和机械理解成为理解上帝概念的关键。今天，当人们否认上帝的存在时，他们往往是在否定牛顿所理解的上帝——宇宙的起源和维系者，而科学家们已经无法再接受这样的上帝。

Newton does not mention the Bible: we know God only by contemplating the world. Hitherto the doctrine of the creation had expressed a spiritual truth: it had entered both Judaism and Christianity late and had always been somewhat problematic. Now the new science had moved the creation to center stage and made a literal and mechanical understanding of the doctrine crucial to the conception of God. When people deny the existence of God today they are often rejecting the God of Newton, the origin and sustainer of the universe whom scientists can no longer accommodate.

为了在本质上包罗万象的体系中为上帝找到容身之地，牛顿本人不得不诉诸一些令人震惊的解释。如果空间是永恒不变且无限的——这是该体系的两个基本特征——那么上帝又该如何定位呢？空间本身难道不具有某种神圣性吗？它既然拥有永恒和无限的属性，难道不也与上帝并存吗？它是否是第二个神圣实体，在时间开始之前就与上帝一同存在？牛顿一直关注着这个问题。在他早期的论文《论引力与流体等距》中，他重新审视了柏拉图的流溢论。既然上帝是无限的，那么他必然无处不在。空间是上帝存在的产物，它从神圣的无所不在中永恒地流溢而出。空间并非上帝出于意志而创造，而是作为他无处不在的存在所必然的结果或延伸而存在。同样地，因为上帝本身是永恒的，所以他流溢了时间。因此，我们可以说，上帝构成了我们生活、行动和存在的时空。另一方面，物质宇宙是上帝在创世之日出于自愿创造的。或许可以说，他决定赋予空间的某些部分形状、密度、可感知性和流动性。因此，我们可以坚持基督教关于无中生有的创造论，因为上帝从空无一物的空间中创造了物质：他从虚空中创造了物质。

Newton himself had to resort to some startling solutions to find room for God in his system, which had of its very nature to be comprehensive. If space was unchangeable and infinite—two cardinal features of the system—where did God fit in? Was not space itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity? Was it a second divine entity, which had existed beside God from before the beginning of time? Newton had always been concerned about this problem. In the early essay De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, he had returned to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation. Since God is infinite, he must exist everywhere. Space is an effect of God’s existence, emanating eternally from the divine omnipresence. It was not created by him in an act of will but existed as a necessary consequence or extension of his ubiquitous being. In the same way, because God himself is eternal, he emanates time. We can, therefore, say that God constitutes that space and time in which we live and move and have our being. Matter, on the other hand, was created by God on the day of creation by a voluntary act. One could perhaps say that he had decided to endow some parts of space with shape, density, perceptibility and mobility. It was possible to stand by the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing because God had brought forth material substance from empty space: he had produced matter out of the void.

与笛卡尔一样，牛顿对神秘主义嗤之以鼻，他将其等同于无知和迷信。他急于清除基督教中的神迹，即便这会让他与基督的神性等关键教义产生冲突。17世纪70年代，他开始认真研究三位一体教义，并得出结论：这是亚他那修为了诱使异教徒皈依基督教而强加给教会的。阿里乌斯是对的：耶稣基督绝非上帝，那些被用来“证明”三位一体和道成肉身教义的新约经文都是伪造的。亚他那修及其同僚伪造了这些经文，并将其添加到圣经正典中，以此迎合大众低劣原始的幻想：“在宗教事务上，人类中那些热情而迷信的人总是喜欢神秘事物，因此他们最喜欢那些他们最不理解的东西。” ¹⁴清除基督教信仰中的这些迷信之物成了牛顿的执念。17世纪80年代初，在出版《自然哲学的数学原理》之前不久，牛顿开始撰写一篇名为《外邦神学的哲学起源》的论文。该论文论证了诺亚创立了原始宗教——一种外邦神学——这种宗教摒弃了迷信，提倡对唯一真神的理性崇拜。唯一的诫命是爱上帝和爱邻舍。人们被要求沉思自然，因为自然是伟大上帝唯一的圣殿。后世用关于神迹奇事的传说败坏了这种纯洁的宗教。有些人甚至重新陷入了偶像崇拜和迷信。然而，上帝派遣了一系列先知来引导他们重回正轨。毕达哥拉斯了解了这种宗教，并将其带到了西方。耶稣曾是奉命呼召世人回归真理的先知之一，但他纯正的信仰却被亚他那修及其同党所败坏。《启示录》预言了三位一体论的兴起——“西方这奇异的宗教”、“三个同等神的崇拜”——是荒凉的可憎之物。 ¹⁵

Like Descartes, Newton had no time for mystery, which he equated with ignorance and superstition. He was anxious to purge Christianity of the miraculous, even if that brought him into conflict with such crucial doctrines as the divinity of Christ. During the 1670s he began a serious theological study of the doctrine of the Trinity and came to the conclusion that it had been foisted on the Church by Athanasius in a specious bid for pagan converts. Arius had been right: Jesus Christ had certainly not been God, and those passages of the New Testament that were used to “prove” the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were spurious. Athanasius and his colleagues had forged them and added them to the canon of scripture, thus appealing to the base, primitive fantasies of the masses: “Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”¹⁴ To expunge this mumbo jumbo from the Christian faith became something of an obsession for Newton. In the early 1680s, shortly before publishing the Principia, Newton began work on a treatise which he called The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology. This argued that Noah had founded the primordial religion—a Gentile theology—which had been free of superstition and had advocated a rational worship of one God. The only commandments were love of God and love of neighbor. Men were commanded to contemplate Nature, the only temple of the great God. Later generations had corrupted this pure religion, with tales of miracles and marvels. Some had fallen back into idolatry and superstition. Yet God had sent a succession of prophets to put them back on course. Pythagoras had learned about this religion and brought it to the West. Jesus had been one of these prophets sent to call mankind back to the truth, but his pure religion had been corrupted by Athanasius and his cohorts. The Book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism—“this strange religion of ye West,” “the cult of three equal Gods”—as the abomination of desolation.¹⁵

西方基督徒一直觉得三位一体教义难以理解，而他们兴起的理性主义更让启蒙运动时期的哲学家和科学家们急于抛弃它。牛顿显然不理解神秘在宗教生活中的作用。希腊人曾使用过三位一体的概念旨在使人们保持敬畏之心，并提醒人们人类的智力永远无法完全理解上帝的本质。然而，对于像牛顿这样的科学家来说，培养这种态度却十分困难。在科学领域，人们逐渐认识到，为了探寻真理，他们必须随时准备抛弃过去，从基本原理重新开始。然而，宗教，如同艺术，往往包含着与过去的对话，以此来寻找看待当下的视角。传统提供了一个出发点，使人们能够参与到关于生命终极意义的永恒问题中。因此，宗教和艺术的运作方式与科学截然不同。然而，在十八世纪，基督徒开始将新的科学方法应用于基督教信仰，并得出了与牛顿相同的结论。在英国，像马修·廷德尔和约翰·托兰这样的激进神学家渴望回归本源，清除基督教的神秘主义，并建立一个真正理性的宗教。在《基督教并非神秘》（169​​6）一书中，托兰德认为神秘只会导致“暴政和迷信”。 ¹⁶认为上帝无法清晰地表达自己是令人反感的。宗教必须是理性的。在《基督教与创世同在》（1730）一书中，廷德尔像牛顿一样，试图重现原始宗教，并清除其中后世的附加物。理性是所有真正宗教的试金石：“从最初的创世起，自然和理性的宗教就铭刻在我们每个人的心中，全人类都必须以此来判断任何制度化宗教的真伪。” ¹⁷ 因此，启示是不必要的，因为真理可以通过我们自身的理性探究来发现；像三位一体和道成肉身这样的奥秘完全可以合理解释，不应该被用来使单纯的信徒受迷信和制度化教会的束缚。

Western Christians had always found the Trinity a difficult doctrine, and their new rationalism would make the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment anxious to discard it. Newton had clearly no understanding of the role of mystery in the religious life. The Greeks had used the Trinity as a means of holding the mind in a state of wonder and as a reminder that human intellect could never understand the nature of God. For a scientist like Newton, however, it was very difficult to cultivate such an attitude. In science people were learning that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again from first principles in order to find the truth. Religion, however, like art often consists of a dialogue with the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present. Tradition provides a jumping-off point which enables men and women to engage with the perennial questions about the ultimate meaning of life. Religion and art, therefore, do not work like science. During the eighteenth century, however, Christians began to apply the new scientific methods to the Christian faith and came up with the same solutions as Newton. In England, radical theologians like Matthew Tindal and John Toland were anxious to go back to basics, purge Christianity of its mysteries and establish a true rational religion. In Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), Toland argued that mystery simply led to “tyranny and superstition.”¹⁶ It was offensive to imagine that God was incapable of expressing himself clearly. Religion had to be reasonable. In Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), Tindal tried, like Newton, to recreate the primordial religion and purge it of later accretions. Rationality was the touchstone of all true religion: “There’s a religion of nature and reason written in the hearts of every one of us from the first creation, by which all mankind must judge of the truth of any institutional religion whatever.”¹⁷ Consequently revelation was unnecessary because the truth could be found by our own rational inquiries; mysteries like the Trinity and the Incarnation had a perfectly reasonable explanation and should not be used to keep the simple faithful in thrall to superstition and an institutional church.

随着这些激进思想传播到欧洲大陆，一批新的历史学家开始客观地研究教会历史。例如，1699年，戈特弗里德·阿诺德出版了其客观中立的著作《从新约圣经开始到1688年的教会史》，书中指出，当时被认为是正统的教义无法追溯到早期教会。约翰·洛伦茨·冯·莫斯海姆（1694-1755）在其权威著作《教会史论》（1726）中刻意将历史与神学分开，记录了教义的发展历程，而没有论证其真实性。其他历史学家，如格奥尔格·瓦尔赫、乔瓦尼·布特和亨利·诺里斯，则研究了诸如阿里乌教派、圣灵由圣父和圣子发出之争以及四、五世纪各种基督论辩论等棘手的教义争议的历史。对于许多信徒来说，看到这些根本性的教义被曲解，令人感到不安。关于上帝和基督本质的教条历经数个世纪发展而来，却并未出现在新约圣经中：这是否意味着它们都是错误的？有些人更进一步，将这种新的客观性应用于新约圣经本身。赫尔曼·塞缪尔·雷马鲁斯（1694-1768）甚至尝试撰写一部关于耶稣的批判性传记：基督的人性问题不再是神秘主义或教义问题，而是接受了理性时代的科学审视。一旦这种情况发生，现代怀疑主义时期便真正拉开了序幕。雷马鲁斯认为，耶稣只是想建立一个神圣的国家，当他的弥赛亚使命失败后，他绝望地死去。他指出，在福音书中，耶稣从未声称自己是为了赎世人的罪孽而来。这种在西方基督教世界占据核心地位的观念，只能追溯到基督教的真正创始人圣保罗。因此，我们不应将耶稣尊为神，而应尊他为“一种非凡、简朴、崇高而又切合实际的宗教”的导师。 ¹⁸

As these radical ideas spread to the Continent, a new breed of historians began to examine church history objectively. Thus in 1699 Gottfried Arnold published his nonpartisan History of the Churches from the Beginning of the New Testament to 1688, arguing that what was currently regarded as orthodox could not be traced back to the primitive church. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694–1755) deliberately separated history from theology in his magisterial Institutions of Ecclesiastical History (1726) and recorded the development of doctrine without arguing for its veracity. Other historians like Georg Walch, Giovanni But and Henry Noris examined the history of difficult doctrinal controversies, such as Arianism, the filioque dispute, and the various Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. It was disturbing for many of the faithful to see that fundamental dogmas about the nature of God and Christ had developed over the centuries and were not present in the New Testament: did that mean that they were false? Others went even further and applied this new objectivity to the New Testament itself. Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) actually attempted a critical biography of Jesus himself: the question of the humanity of Christ was no longer a mystical or doctrinal matter but was being subjected to the scientific scrutiny of the Age of Reason. Once this had happened, the modern period of skepticism was well and truly launched. Reimarus argued that Jesus had simply wanted to found a godly state and when his messianic mission had failed he had died in despair. He pointed out that in the Gospels Jesus never claimed that he had come to atone for the sins of mankind. That idea, which had become central to Western Christendom, could only be traced to St. Paul, the true founder of Christianity. We should not revere Jesus as God, therefore, but as the teacher of a “remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion.”¹⁸

这些客观研究依赖于对经文的字面理解，而忽略了信仰的象征或隐喻本质。有人可能会反驳说，这种批评与艺术或诗歌一样无关紧要。但一旦科学精神成为许多人的规范，他们就很难以其他方式解读福音书。西方基督徒如今致力于对信仰进行字面理解，并已无可挽回地远离了神话：一个故事要么是事实，要么是妄想。关于宗教起源的问题对基督徒来说比对佛教徒来说更为重要，因为他们的一神论传统一直声称上帝在历史事件中显现。因此，如果基督徒要在科学时代保持信仰的完整性，就必须正视这些问题。一些持有比廷德尔或雷马鲁斯更为传统信仰的基督徒也开始质疑西方传统的上帝观。在路德宗信徒约翰·弗里德曼·迈耶 (John Friedmann Mayer) 的小册子《维滕贝格的双重谋杀案的无罪》 (1681) 中，他写道，安瑟伦阐述的传统赎罪教义——将上帝描绘成要求杀死自己的儿子——对神性的理解是不充分的。上帝是“公义的上帝，愤怒的上帝”和“充满怨恨的上帝”，祂要求严厉的惩罚，这让许多基督徒感到恐惧，并让他们对自身的“罪性”感到厌恶。^越来越多的基督徒对基督教历史上如此多的残酷行径感到羞愧，这些行径以这位公义上帝的名义进行了可怕的十字军东征、宗教裁判所和迫害。强迫人们相信正统教义对于一个日益崇尚自由和良心自由的时代而言，这些教义显得格外令人震惊。宗教改革及其后果引发的血腥屠杀似乎成了压垮骆驼的最后一根稻草。

These objective studies depended upon a literal understanding of scripture and ignored the symbolic or metaphorical nature of the faith. One might object that this kind of criticism was as irrelevant as it might be to art or poetry. But once the scientific spirit had become normative for many people, it was difficult for them to read the Gospels in any other way. Western Christians were now committed to a literal understanding of their faith and had taken an irrevocable step back from myth: a story was either factually true or it was a delusion. Questions about the origin of religion were more important to Christians than, say, to Buddhists because their monotheistic tradition had always claimed that God was revealed in historical events. If Christians were to preserve their integrity in the scientific age, therefore, these questions had to be addressed. Some Christians who held more conventional beliefs than Tindal or Reimarus were beginning to question the traditional Western understanding of God. In his tract Wittenburg’s Innocence of a Double Murder (1681), the Lutheran John Friedmann Mayer wrote that the traditional doctrine of the atonement, as outlined by Anselm, which depicted God demanding the death of his own Son, presented an inadequate conception of the divine. He was “the righteous God, the angered God” and “the embittered God,” whose demands for strict retribution filled so many Christians with fear and taught them to recoil from their own “sinfulness.”¹⁹ More and more Christians were embarrassed by the cruelty of so much Christian history, which had conducted fearful crusades, inquisitions and persecutions in the name of this just God. Coercing people to believe in orthodox doctrines seemed particularly appalling to an age increasingly enamored of liberty and freedom of conscience. The bloodbath unleashed by the Reformation and its aftermath seemed the final straw.

理性似乎是答案。然而，一个失去了神秘感的上帝——这种神秘感曾使他成为其他宗教传统中几个世纪以来有效的宗教象征——还能吸引那些更具想象力和直觉的基督徒吗？清教徒诗人约翰·弥尔顿（1608-1674）尤其对教会的不宽容记录感到不安。作为他那个时代的典型人物，他曾在未发表的论文《论基督教教义》中试图改革宗教改革，并为自己构建一套不依赖于他人信仰和判断的宗教信条。他对诸如三位一体之类的传统教义也持怀疑态度。然而，值得注意的是，在他那部杰作《失乐园》中，真正的英雄是撒旦，而不是他试图向世人证明其行为正当性的上帝。撒旦拥有许多欧洲新时代的人物的特质：他挑战权威，挑战未知，在他从地狱穿越混沌到达新生地球的勇敢旅程中，他成为了第一位探险家。然而，弥尔顿笔下的上帝似乎揭示了西方字面主义固有的荒谬之处。若缺乏对三位一体的神秘理解，圣子在诗中的地位便显得极其模糊。他究竟是第二位神圣存在，还是类似于天使但地位更高的受造物，这一点并不明确。无论如何，他和圣父是两个完全独立的个体，他们必须进行冗长乏味的对话才能了解彼此的意图，即便圣子是公认的圣父的圣言和智慧。

Reason seemed the answer. Yet could a God drained of the mystery that had for centuries made him an effective religious value in other traditions appeal to the more imaginative and intuitive Christians? The Puritan poet John Milton (1608–74) was particularly disturbed by the Church’s record of intolerance. A true man of his age, he had attempted, in his unpublished treatise On Christian Doctrine, to reform the Reformation and to work out a religious creed for himself that did not rely upon the beliefs and judgments of others. He was also doubtful about such traditional doctrines as the Trinity, Yet it is significant that the true hero of his masterpiece Paradise Lost is Satan rather than the God whose actions he intended to justify to man. Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe: he defies authority, pits himself against the unknown, and in his intrepid journeys from Hell, through Chaos to the newly created earth, he becomes the first explorer. Milton’s God, however, seems to bring out the inherent absurdity of Western literalism. Without the mystical understanding of the Trinity, the position of the Son is highly ambiguous in the poem. It is by no means clear whether he is a second divine being or a creature similar to, though of higher status than, the angels. At all events, he and the Father are two entirely separate beings who must engage in lengthy conversations of deep tedium to learn each other’s intentions, even though the Son is the acknowledged Word and Wisdom of the Father.

然而，弥尔顿对上帝预知世间万物的处理方式，却使他的神性显得难以置信。既然上帝必然早已知晓亚当和夏娃将会堕落——甚至在撒旦降临人间之前——那么他便必须为自己在事件发生前的行为做出一些颇为牵强的辩解。他向圣子解释说，他并不乐于强迫人服从，而且他已经赋予亚当和夏娃抵御撒旦的能力。因此，上帝辩解道，他们无权指责……

It is, however, Milton’s treatment of God’s foreknowledge of events on earth that makes his deity incredible. Since of necessity God already knows that Adam and Eve will fall—even before Satan has reached the earth—he must engage in some pretty specious justification of his actions before the event. He would have no pleasure in enforced obedience, he explains to the Son, and he had given Adam and Eve the ability to withstand Satan. Therefore they could not, God argues defensively, justly accuse

这种拙劣的思维方式不仅令人难以信服，而且上帝也显得冷酷无情、自以为是，完全缺乏其宗教本应激发的慈悲之心。强迫上帝像我们一样说话思考，恰恰暴露了这种拟人化、人格化的神性概念的缺陷。这样的上帝自相矛盾之处太多，既不连贯，也不值得敬拜。

Not only is it difficult to respect this shoddy thinking, but God comes across as callous, self-righteous and entirely lacking in the compassion that his religion was supposed to inspire. Forcing God to speak and think like one of us in this way shows the inadequacies of such an anthropomorphic and personalistic conception of the divine. There are too many contradictions for such a God to be either coherent or worthy of veneration.

对诸如上帝全知之类的教义进行字面理解是行不通的。弥尔顿笔下的上帝不仅冷酷无情、墨守成规，而且还极其无能。在《失乐园》的最后两卷中，上帝派遣大天使米迦勒去安慰亚当，向他展示他的后裔将如何得到救赎。整个救赎历史以一系列画面的形式展现在亚当面前，并由米迦勒进行解说：他看到了该隐谋杀亚伯、洪水和诺亚方舟、巴别塔、上帝呼召亚伯拉罕、以色列人出埃及以及上帝在西奈山颁布律法。米迦勒解释说，律法的不足之处——它压迫了上帝不幸的选民几个世纪——是上帝为了让他们渴望更具灵性的律法而设下的圈套。随着对未来世界救赎的叙述不断展开——从大卫王的功绩、被掳巴比伦到基督的降生等等——读者不禁会想，一定存在一种更简便、更直接的救赎人类的方式。然而，这个曲折离奇、屡屡失败、反复无常的计划竟然是事先注定的，这无疑会让人对作者的智慧产生严重的怀疑。弥尔顿笔下的上帝难以令人信服。值得注意的是，在《失乐园》之后，再也没有其他重要的英国作家尝试描绘超自然世界。斯宾塞和弥尔顿这样的作家再也没有出现。从此，超自然和精神领域沦为乔治·麦克唐纳和C·S·刘易斯等边缘作家的专属领域。然而，一个无法激发想象力的上帝，注定会陷入困境。

The literal understanding of such doctrines as the omniscience of God will not work. Not only is Milton’s God cold and legalistic, he is also grossly incompetent. In the last two books of Paradise Lost, God sends the Archangel Michael to console Adam for his sin by showing him how his descendants will be redeemed. The whole course of salvation history is revealed to Adam in a series of tableaux, with a commentary by Michael: he sees the murder of Abel by Cain, the Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the call of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law on Sinai. The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed God’s unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law. As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses—through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth—it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author. Milton’s God can inspire little confidence. It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world. There would be no more Spensers or Miltons. Henceforth the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. Yet a God who cannot appeal to the imagination is in trouble.

在《失乐园》的结尾，亚当和夏娃独自离开了伊甸园，走向了外面的世界。在西方，基督徒们也经历了类似的悲剧。尽管人们仍然信仰上帝，但他们正处于一个更加世俗化的时代的门槛上。这种新的理性宗教被称为自然神论。它摒弃了神秘主义和神话等充满想象力的修行方式，背弃了启示的神话以及诸如三位一体之类的传统“奥秘”，这些奥秘长期以来一直使人们深陷迷信的泥沼。相反，它宣称效忠于非人格化的“上帝”，人类可以通过自身的努力去发现祂。弗朗索瓦-玛丽·德·伏尔泰，这位后来被称为启蒙运动的代表人物，在他的《哲学辞典》（1764年）中定义了这种理想的宗教。它最重要的特点是尽可能地简单。

At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world. In the West too, Christians were on the threshold of a more secular age, though they still adhered to belief in God. The new religion of reason would be known as Deism. It had no time for the imaginative disciplines of mysticism and mythology. It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such traditional “mysteries” as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superstition. Instead it declared allegiance to the impersonal “Deus” which man could discover by his own efforts. François-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It would, above all, be as simple as possible.

教会对此只能怪自己，因为几个世纪以来，他们用繁复的教义束缚了信徒，使他们不堪重负。这种反应是不可避免的，甚至可能是积极的。

The churches had only themselves to blame for this defiance, since for centuries they had burdened the faithful with a crippling number of doctrines. The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive.

然而，启蒙运动的哲学家们并没有否定上帝的概念。他们否定的是正统教会中那个以永恒之火威胁人类的残酷上帝，以及那些与理性相悖的神秘教义。但他们对至高无上存在的信仰却始终如一。伏尔泰在费尔内建造了一座小教堂，门楣上刻着“上帝已逝，伏尔泰归于上帝”（Deo Erexit Voltaire）的字样，他甚至认为，如果上帝不存在，人们就必须创造一个上帝。在《哲学辞典》中，他论证了信仰一神比信仰众多神祇更理性、更符合人类的本性。最初，居住在偏远村落和社群中的人们就承认，他们的命运掌握在一位神手中：多神论是后来的发展。科学和理性哲学都指向至高无上存在的存在：“我们能从这一切中得出什么结论呢？”伏尔泰在《哲学辞典》中关于“无神论”的文章结尾处问道。他回答说：

The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason. But their belief in a Supreme Being remained intact. Voltaire built a chapel at Ferney with the inscription “Deo Erexit Voltaire” inscribed on the lintel and went so far as to suggest that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. In the Philosophical Dictionary, he had argued that faith in one god was more rational and natural to humanity than belief in numerous deities. Originally people living in isolated hamlets and communities had acknowledged that a single god had control of their destinies: polytheism was a later development. Science and rational philosophy both pointed to the existence of a Supreme Being: “What conclusion can we draw from all this?” Voltaire asks at the end of his essay on “Atheism” in the Dictionary. He replies:

伏尔泰将无神论等同于哲学家们极力想要根除的迷信和狂热。他的问题不在于上帝本身，而在于那些违背理性神圣标准的关于上帝的教条。

Voltaire equated atheism with the superstition and fanaticism that the philosophers were so anxious to eradicate. His problem was not God but the doctrines about him which offended against the sacred standard of reason.

欧洲的犹太人也受到了这些新思想的影响。巴鲁赫·斯宾诺莎（1632-1677）是一位拥有西班牙血统的荷兰犹太人，他对研习《托拉》感到不满，于是加入了一个由非犹太人自由思想家组成的哲学圈子。他发展出的思想与传统犹太教截然不同，并受到了笛卡尔等科学思想家和基督教经院哲学家的影响。1656年，24岁的他被正式逐出阿姆斯特丹的犹太教堂。在宣读逐出教籍的法令时，教堂的灯光逐渐熄灭，直到会众完全陷入黑暗，让他们亲身体验斯宾诺莎在无神世界中灵魂的黑暗。

The Jews of Europe had also been affected by the new ideas. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), a Dutch Jew of Spanish descent, had become discontented with the study of Torah and had joined a philosophical circle of Gentile freethinkers. He evolved ideas which were profoundly different from conventional Judaism and which had been influenced by scientific thinkers such as Descartes and the Christian scholastics. In 1656, at the age of twenty-four, he was formally cast out of the synagogue of Amsterdam. While the edict of excommunication was read out, the lights of the synagogue were gradually extinguished until the congregation was left in total darkness, experiencing for themselves the darkness of Spinoza’s soul in a God-less world:

从此，斯宾诺莎不再属于欧洲的任何宗教团体。因此，他成为了后来在西方盛行的独立世俗世界观的原型。在二十世纪初，许多人将斯宾诺莎奉为现代性的英雄，对他们象征性的流放、疏离以及对世俗救赎的追求感同身受。

Henceforth Spinoza belonged to none of the religious communities of Europe. As such, he was the prototype of the autonomous, secular outlook that would become current in the West. In the early twentieth century, many people revered Spinoza as the hero of modernity, feeling an affinity with his symbolic exile, alienation and quest for secular salvation.

斯宾诺莎一直被认为是无神论者，但他确实相信上帝的存在，尽管他所信奉的并非《圣经》中的上帝。与费拉苏夫夫妇一样，他认为启示宗教不如哲学家所获得的关于上帝的科学知识。宗教信仰的本质一直是……他在《神学政治论》中指出，宗教被误解了，沦为“轻信与偏见的混合体”，“一堆毫无意义的神秘之物”。 ²⁴他批判性地审视了圣经历史。以色列人将他们无法理解的任何现象都称为“上帝”。例如，先知们被认为受到上帝之灵的启示，仅仅因为他们拥有卓越的智慧和圣洁。但这种“启示”并非精英专属，而是人人皆可通过自然理性获得：信仰的仪式和象征只能帮助那些缺乏科学理性思维的大众。

Spinoza has been regarded as an atheist, but he did have a belief in a God, even though this was not the God of the Bible. Like the Faylasufs, he saw revealed religion as inferior to the scientific knowledge of God acquired by the philosopher. The nature of religious faith had been misunderstood, he argued in A Theologico-Political Treatise. It had become “a mere compound of credulity and prejudices,” a “tissue of meaningless mysteries.”²⁴ He looked critically at biblical history. The Israelites had called any phenomenon that they could not understand “God.” The prophets, for example, were said to have been inspired by God’s Spirit simply because they were men of exceptional intellect and holiness. But this kind of “inspiration” was not confined to an elite but was available to everybody through natural reason: the rites and symbols of the faith could only help the masses who were incapable of scientific, rational thought.

与笛卡尔一样，斯宾诺莎回归了上帝存在的本体论证明。“上帝”这一概念本身就包含着对上帝存在的验证，因为一个不存在的完美存在本身就是自相矛盾的。上帝的存在是必要的，因为唯有它才能提供必要的确定性和信心，从而对现实做出其他推论。我们对世界的科学理解表明，世界受制于永恒不变的法则。对斯宾诺莎而言，上帝仅仅是法则的原则，是所有永恒法则的总和。上帝是物质的存在，与支配宇宙的秩序相同且等同。与牛顿一样，斯宾诺莎回归了古老的哲学思想——流溢。因为上帝内在于万物之中——无论是物质的还是精神的——所以它可以被定义为支配万物存在的法则。谈论上帝在世界中的活动，只不过是描述存在的数学和因果原则的一种方式。这完全否定了超越性。

Like Descartes, Spinoza returned to the Ontological Proof for God’s existence. The very idea of “God” contains a validation of God’s existence because a perfect being which did not exist would be a contradiction in terms. The existence of God was necessary because it alone provided the certainty and confidence necessary to make other deductions about reality. Our scientific understanding of the world shows us that it is governed by immutable laws. For Spinoza God is simply the principle of law, the sum of all the eternal laws in existence. God is a material being, identical with and equivalent to the order which governs the universe. Like Newton, Spinoza returned to the old philosophical idea of emanation. Because God is inherent and immanent in all things—material and spiritual—it can be defined as the law that orders their existence. To speak of God’s activity in the world was simply a way of describing the mathematical and causal principles of existence. It was an absolute denial of transcendence.

这看似一种阴郁的教义，却激发了斯宾诺莎对上帝真正的神秘敬畏。作为所有存在法则的总和，上帝是至高无上的完美，它将万物融为一体，和谐共存。当人类按照笛卡尔的教导反思自身思维的运作方式时，他们便向内在运作的永恒无限的上帝敞开了心扉。与柏拉图一样，斯宾诺莎相信，直觉和自发的知识比费力地获取事实更能揭示上帝的存在。我们在知识中获得的喜悦和幸福等同于对上帝的爱，这位神并非永恒的思维对象，而是思维的起因和原则，与每一个人都深刻地融为一体。无需启示或神圣法则：这位上帝对全人类开放，而唯一的律法便是永恒的自然法则。斯宾诺莎使旧形而上学与新科学相契合：他的上帝并非新柏拉图主义者不可知的“一”，而是更接近于托马斯·阿奎那等哲学家所描述的绝对存在。但同时，他也接近于神秘主义的上帝。正统的一神论者在自身内部体验到了这一点。犹太教徒、基督教徒和哲学家倾向于将斯宾诺莎视为无神论者：他认为上帝并非人格化的，而是与现实的其他部分密不可分的。事实上，斯宾诺莎使用“上帝”一词仅仅是出于历史原因：他认同无神论者的观点，即现实无法被分割成“上帝”和非上帝两部分。如果上帝无法与任何事物分离，那么就无法说“他”在任何通常意义上存在。斯宾诺莎实际上是在说，并不存在一个符合我们通常赋予“上帝”一词含义的上帝。但几个世纪以来，神秘主义者和哲学家们一直在表达同样的观点。有些人甚至认为，除了我们所知的世界之外，根本不存在“虚无”。如果不是因为缺少超越性的“无限”（En Sof），斯宾诺莎的泛神论就会类似于卡巴拉，我们或许能感受到激进神秘主义与新出现的无神论之间的某种联系。

It seems a bleak doctrine, but Spinoza’s God inspired him with a truly mystical awe. As the aggregate of all the laws in existence, God was the highest perfection, which welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds in the way that Descartes had enjoined, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite being of God at work within them. Like Plato, Spinoza believed that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of God more than a laborious acquisition of facts. Our joy and happiness in knowledge is equivalent to the love of God, a deity which is not an eternal object of thought but the cause and principle of that thought, deeply one with every single human being. There is no need for revelation or divine law: this God is accessible to the whole of humanity, and the only Torah is the eternal law of nature. Spinoza brought the old metaphysics into line with the new science: his God was not the unknowable One of the Neoplatonists but closer to the absolute Being described by philosophers like Aquinas. But it was also close to the mystical God experienced by orthodox monotheists within themselves. Jews, Christians and philosophers tended to see Spinoza as an atheist: there was nothing personal about this God, which was inseparable from the rest of reality. Indeed, Spinoza had only used the word “God” for historical reasons: he agreed with atheists, who claim that reality cannot be divided into a part which is “God” and a part which is not-God. If God cannot be separated from anything else, it is impossible to say that “he” exists in any ordinary sense. What Spinoza was saying in effect was that there was no God that corresponded to the meaning we usually attach to that word. But mystics and philosophers had been making the same point for centuries. Some had said that there was “Nothing” apart from the world we know. Were it not for the absence of the transcendent En Sof, Spinoza’s pantheism would resemble Kabbalah and we could sense an affinity between radical mysticism and the newly emergent atheism.

然而，真正为犹太人进入现代欧洲铺平道路的是德国哲学家摩西·门德尔松（1729-1786），尽管他最初并没有构建一套专门的犹太哲学的意图。他对心理学、美学以及宗教都颇感兴趣，他的早期著作《斐多篇》和《晨祷》只是在更广泛的德国启蒙运动背景下写成的：它们试图从理性的角度论证上帝的存在，而没有从犹太视角来探讨这个问题。在法国和德国等国家，启蒙运动的自由主义思想带来了解放，使犹太人得以融入社会。对于这些被称为“启蒙运动者”（maskilim）的开明犹太人来说，接受德国启蒙运动的宗教哲学并不困难。犹太教从未像西方基督教那样执着于教义。它的基本信条实际上与启蒙运动的理性宗教完全一致，而启蒙运动的理性宗教在德国仍然接受奇迹和上帝干预人类事务的观念。在《晨祷》中，门德尔松的哲学上帝与圣经中的上帝非常相似。他是一位有血有肉的上帝，而非形而上学的抽象概念。智慧、善良、正义、仁慈和理智等人类特质，在其最高意义上，都可以用来形容这位至高无上的存在。

It was the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) who opened the way for Jews to enter modern Europe, however, though at first he had no intention of constructing a specifically Jewish philosophy. He was interested in psychology and aesthetics as well as religion, and his early works Phaedon and Morning Hours were written simply within the context of the broader German Enlightenment: they sought to establish the existence of God on rational grounds and did not consider the question from a Jewish perspective. In countries like France and Germany, the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment brought emancipation and enabled Jews to enter society. It was not difficult for these maskilim, as the enlightened Jews were called, to accept the religious philosophy of the German Enlightenment. Judaism had never had the same doctrinal obsession as Western Christianity. Its basic tenets were practically identical with the rational religion of the Enlightenment, which in Germany still accepted the notion of miracles and God’s intervention in human affairs. In Morning Hours, Mendelssohn’s philosophical God was very similar to the God of the Bible. It was a personal God, not a metaphysical abstraction. Human characteristics such as wisdom, goodness, justice, loving-kindness and intellect could in their loftiest sense all be applied to this Supreme Being.

但这使得门德尔松的上帝与我们非常相似。他的信仰是典型的启蒙运动时期的信仰：冷静、客观，倾向于忽略宗教体验中的悖论和歧义。门德尔松认为没有上帝的生命毫无意义，但这并非一种充满激情的信仰：他完全满足于通过理性所能获得的关于上帝的知识。上帝的善是他神学的核心。如果人类门德尔松认为，如果仅仅依靠启示，就与上帝的良善相悖，因为显然有太多人被排除在神圣计划之外。因此，他的哲学摒弃了哲学（Falsafah）所要求的深奥的智力技能——这些技能只有少数人才能掌握——而更多地依赖于人人都能理解的常识。然而，这种方法也存在危险，因为我们很容易使这样的上帝符合我们自身的偏见，并将其奉为绝对真理。

But this makes Mendelssohn’s God very much like us. His was a typical Enlightenment faith: cool, dispassionate and tending to ignore the paradoxes and ambiguities of religious experience. Mendelssohn saw life without God as meaningless, but this was not a passionate faith: he was quite content with the knowledge of God attainable by reason. God’s goodness is the hinge on which his theology hangs. If human beings had to rely on revelation alone, Mendelssohn argued, this would be inconsistent with God’s goodness because so many people had apparently been excluded from the divine plan. Hence his philosophy dispensed with the abstruse intellectual skills demanded by Falsafah—which were only possible for a few people—and relied more on common sense, which was within everybody’s grasp. There is a danger in such an approach, however, because it is all too easy to make such a God conform to our own prejudices and make them absolute.

《斐多篇》于1767年出版后，其对灵魂不朽的哲学辩护在非犹太教徒和基督教徒圈子中得到了积极的回应，尽管有时这种回应带有居高临下的意味。一位年轻的瑞士牧师约翰·卡斯帕·拉瓦特写道，作者门德尔松已具备皈依基督教的条件，并挑战他公开捍卫自己的犹太教信仰。于是，门德尔松几乎是违背自己的意愿，被迫理性地捍卫犹太教，尽管他并不信奉诸如“选民”或“应许之地”之类的传统信仰。他必须小心翼翼地行事：他不想重蹈斯宾诺莎的覆辙，也不想因为捍卫犹太教过于成功而招致基督徒的愤怒。与其他自然神论者一样，他认为，只有当启示的真理能够被理性证明时，才能被接受。三位一体的教义并不符合他的标准。犹太教并非启示宗教，而是启示律法。犹太人的上帝观本质上与全人类的自然宗教相同，这种自然宗教无需借助任何外力即可证明。门德尔松援引古老的宇宙论和本体论论证，认为律法的作用在于帮助犹太人培养正确的上帝观，避免偶像崇拜。他最后呼吁宽容。他认为，普世的理性宗教应当引导人们尊重其他认识上帝的方式，包括曾被欧洲教会迫害数个世纪的犹太教。

When Phaedon had been published in 1767, its philosophic defense of the immortality of the soul was positively, if sometimes patronizingly, received in Gentile or Christian circles. A young Swiss pastor, Johann Caspar Lavater, wrote that the author was ripe for conversion to Christianity and challenged Mendelssohn to defend his Judaism in public. Mendelssohn was, then, drawn almost against his will into a rational defense of Judaism, even though he did not espouse such traditional beliefs as that of a chosen people or a promised land. He had to tread a fine line: he did not want to go the way of Spinoza or bring down the wrath of the Christians upon his own people if his defense of Judaism proved too successful. Like other deists, he argued that revelation could only be accepted if its truths could be demonstrated by reason. The doctrine of the Trinity did not meet his criterion. Judaism was not a revealed religion but a revealed law. The Jewish conception of God was essentially identical to the natural religion that belonged to the whole of humanity and could be demonstrated by unaided reason. Mendelssohn relied on the old cosmological and ontological proofs, arguing that the function of the Law had been to help the Jews to cultivate a correct notion of God and to avoid idolatry. He ended with a plea for toleration. The universal religion of reason should lead to a respect for other ways of approaching God, including Judaism, which the churches of Europe had persecuted for centuries.

犹太人受门德尔松的影响远不及伊曼努尔·康德的哲学，康德的《纯粹理性批判》（1781 ^）出版于门德尔松生命的最后十年。康德将启蒙运动定义为“人类摆脱自我束缚”或依赖外部权威。25他认为通往上帝的唯一途径是通过自主的道德良知领域，他称之为“实践理性”。他摒弃了许多宗教的外在形式，例如教会的教条权威、祈祷和仪式，这些都阻碍了人类依靠自身的力量，并鼓励他们依赖他人。但康德并非反对上帝本身。与安萨里一样，他也持相同观点。几个世纪前，他就论证过，传统的上帝存在论证毫无用处，因为我们的思维只能理解存在于空间或时间中的事物，而无法理解超越这一范畴的现实。但他承认，人类天生倾向于超越这些局限，寻求一种统一的原则，从而将现实视为一个连贯的整体。这就是上帝的观念。我们无法用逻辑证明上帝的存在，也无法证伪它。上帝观念对我们至关重要：它代表着理想的极限，使我们能够对世界形成一个全面的认识。

Jews were less influenced by Mendelssohn than by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was published in the last decade of Mendelssohn’s life. Kant had defined the Enlightenment as “man’s exodus from his self-imposed tutelage” or reliance upon external authority.²⁵ The only way to God lay through the autonomous realm of moral conscience, which he called “practical reason.” He dismissed many of the trappings of religion, such as the dogmatic authority of the churches, prayer and ritual, which all prevented human beings from relying upon their own powers and encouraged them to depend upon Another. But Kant was not opposed to the idea of God per se. Like al-Ghazzali centuries earlier, he argued that the traditional arguments for the existence of God were useless because our minds could only understand things that exist in space or time and are not competent to consider realities that lie beyond this category. But he allowed that humanity had a natural tendency to transgress these limits and seek a principle of unity that would give us a vision of reality as a coherent whole. This was the idea of God. It was not possible to prove God’s existence logically, but neither was it possible to disprove it. The idea of God was essential to us: it represented the ideal limit that enabled us to achieve a comprehensive idea of the world.

因此，对康德而言，上帝仅仅是一种便利，而且可能被滥用。一位智慧全能的造物主的概念可能会削弱科学研究，导致人们懒惰地依赖“机械降神”（deus ex machina），即一个填补我们知识空白的神。它也可能成为不必要的神秘化之源，引发激烈的争论，例如教会历史上那些伤痕累累的争论。康德会否认自己是无神论者。他的同时代人称他为虔诚的信徒，深刻地意识到人类作恶的能力。这使得上帝的概念对他而言至关重要。在《实践理性批判》中，康德论证说，为了过上道德的生活，人们需要一位统治者，以幸福来奖赏美德。从这个角度来看，上帝只不过是作为事后添加的伦理体系的一部分。宗教的核心不再是上帝的奥秘，而是人本身。上帝已成为一种策略，使我们能够更高效、更合乎道德地行事，而不再是万物存在的根基。不久之后，一些人会将他关于自主性的理想更进一步，彻底抛弃这个略显脆弱的上帝。康德是西方最早质疑传统论证有效性的人之一，他指出这些论证实际上什么也证明不了。此后，这些论证再也没有那么令人信服了。

For Kant, therefore, God was simply a convenience, which could be misused. The idea of a wise and omnipotent Creator could undermine scientific research and lead to a lazy reliance on a deus ex machina, a god who fills the gaps of our knowledge. It could also be a source of unnecessary mystification, which leads to acrimonious disputes such as those that have scarred the history of the churches. Kant would have denied that he was an atheist. His contemporaries described him as a devout man, who was profoundly aware of mankind’s capacity for evil. This made the idea of God essential to him. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argued that in order to live a moral life, men and women needed a governor, who would reward virtue with happiness. In this perspective, God was simply tacked on to the ethical system as an afterthought. The center of religion was no longer the mystery of God but man himself. God has become a strategy which enables us to function more efficiently and morally and is no longer the ground of all being. It would not be long before some would take his ideal of autonomy one step further and dispense with this somewhat tenuous God altogether. Kant had been one of the first people in the West to doubt the validity of the traditional proofs, showing that in fact they proved nothing. They would never appear quite so convincing again.

然而，这似乎让一些基督徒感到解脱，他们坚信上帝关闭了一条通往信仰的道路，只是为了开启另一条。约翰·卫斯理（1703-1791）在《纯正基督教义的简述》中写道：

This seemed liberating to some Christians, however, who firmly believed that God had closed one path to faith only to open another. In A Plain Account of Genuine Christianity, John Wesley (1703–91) wrote:

与启蒙运动的理性主义相伴而生的，是一种新型的虔诚，常被称为“心灵的宗教”。尽管它以心灵而非头脑为中心，却与自然神论有着诸多共同的关注点。它敦促人们摒弃外在的证据和权威，去发现存在于每个人内心深处和能力范围内的神。如同许多自然神论者一样，卫斯理兄弟或德国虔敬派伯爵尼古拉斯·路德维希·冯·津岑多夫（1700-1760）的门徒们，都感到他们正在摆脱几个世纪以来积累的种种束缚，回归基督和早期基督徒所信奉的“朴素”而“纯粹”的基督教。

A new type of piety developed alongside the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which is often called “the religion of the heart.” Although it was centered in the heart rather than the head, it shared many of the same preoccupations as Deism. It urged men and women to abandon external proofs and authorities and discover the God who was within the heart and capacity of everybody. Like many of the deists, the disciples of the Wesley brothers or of the German Pietist Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60) felt that they were shaking off the accretions of centuries and returning to the “plain” and “genuine” Christianity of Christ and the first Christians.

约翰·卫斯理一直是一位虔诚的基督徒。年轻时，他还是牛津大学林肯学院的研究员，就和哥哥查尔斯一起创立了一个名为“圣洁俱乐部”（Holy Club）的本科生社团。该社团注重方法和纪律，因此其成员被称为“卫理公会教徒”（Methodists）。1735年，约翰和查尔斯作为传教士前往美洲的佐治亚殖民地，但两年后，约翰沮丧地返回，并在日记中写道：“我去美洲是为了感化印第安人；可是，谁来感化我呢？” ²⁷在航行期间，卫斯理兄弟深受摩拉维亚教派一些传教士的影响。摩拉维亚教派摒弃一切教义，坚持认为宗教信仰仅仅是一种内心的体验。1738年，约翰在伦敦奥尔德斯盖特街的一座小教堂参加摩拉维亚教派的聚会时经历了一次皈依，这使他确信自己直接领受了上帝的使命，要将这种新型的基督教传播到整个英格兰。此后，他和他的门徒们周游全国，在集市和田野里向工人阶级和农民布道。

John Wesley had always been a fervent Christian. When he was a young Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he and his brother Charles had founded a society for undergraduates, known as the Holy Club. It was strong on method and discipline, so its members became known as Methodists. In 1735, John and Charles sailed to the colony of Georgia in America as missionaries, but John returned disconsolate two years later, noting in his journal: “I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who will convert me?”²⁷ During the voyage, the Wesleys had been much impressed by some missionaries of the Moravian sect, which eschewed all doctrine and insisted that religion was simply an affair of the heart. In 1738 John underwent a conversion experience during a Moravian meeting in a chapel in Aldersgate Street, London, which convinced him that he had received a direct mission from God to preach this new kind of Christianity throughout England. Thenceforth he and his disciples toured the country, preaching to the working classes and the peasantry in the markets and fields.

“重生”的经历至关重要。体验“上帝仿佛不断地向人的灵魂吹气”是“绝对必要的”，它使基督徒充满“对上帝的持续感恩之爱”，这种爱是能够被有意识地感受到的，并使人“自然而然地，并且在某种程度上是必然地，以仁慈、温柔和恒久的忍耐去爱上帝的每一个儿女”。28^关于上帝的教义毫无用处，甚至可能有害。基督的话语对信徒的心理影响是宗教真理的最佳证明。如同清教主义一样，对宗教的情感体验是真正信仰乃至救赎的唯一证明。但这种人人皆可参与的神秘主义可能很危险。神秘主义者一直强调灵性道路的危险，并警告人们不要歇斯底里：平和与宁静才是真正神秘主义的标志。这种重生的基督教可能会导致狂热的行为，就像暴力事件一样。贵格会教徒和震教徒的狂喜。但这也可能导致绝望：诗人威廉·考珀（1731-1800）在不再感到自己得救时发疯，他认为这种感觉的缺失是他被诅咒的标志。

The experience of being “born again” was crucial. It was “absolutely necessary” to experience “God continually breathing, as it were, upon the human soul,” filling the Christian with “a continual, thankful love to God” that was consciously felt and which made it “natural and, in a manner, necessary, to love every child of God with kindness, gentleness and long suffering.”²⁸ Doctrines about God were useless and could be damaging. The psychological effect of Christ’s words on the believer was the best proof of the truth of religion. As in Puritanism, an emotional experience of religion was the only proof of genuine faith and hence of salvation. But this mysticism-for-everybody could be dangerous. Mystics had always stressed the perils of the spiritual paths and warned against hysteria: peace and tranquillity were the signs of a true mysticism. This Born-Again Christianity could produce frenzied behavior, as in the violent ecstasies of the Quakers and Shakers. It could also lead to despair: the poet William Cowper (1731–1800) went mad when he no longer felt saved, imagining that this lack of sensation was a sign that he was damned.

在心灵的宗教中，关于上帝的教义被转化为内在的情感状态。因此，居住在萨克森庄园的几处宗教团体的赞助人金岑多夫伯爵，像卫斯理一样认为，“信仰不在思想中，也不在头脑中，而是在心中，是照亮心灵的光芒。” ²⁹学者们可以继续“喋喋不休地谈论三位一体的奥秘”，但这一教义的意义不在于三位一体彼此之间的关系，而在于“他们对我们而言意味着什么”。 ³⁰ 道成肉身表达了基督徒个体重生的奥秘，基督成为“心灵之王”。这种情感型的灵修方式也出现在罗马天主教会中，体现在对耶稣圣心的敬礼中。尽管耶稣会士和教会权威人士对其常常流露出的感伤主义抱有怀疑，但这种敬礼仍然得以确立。这尊雕像流传至今：许多罗马天主教堂内都供奉着一尊耶稣的雕像，他袒露胸膛，露出被火焰环绕的圆球状心脏。这正是耶稣在法国帕雷勒莫尼亚尔修道院向玛格丽特-玛丽·阿拉科克（1647-1690）显现的形象。这尊耶稣像与福音书中那个粗暴的形象截然不同。他自怨自艾的姿态，揭示了过分注重情感而忽略理性的危险。1682年，玛格丽特-玛丽回忆起耶稣在四旬斋开始时向她显现的情景：

In the religion of the heart, doctrines about God were transposed into interior emotional states. Thus Count von Zinzendorf, the patron of several religious communities who lived on his estates in Saxony, argued like Wesley that “faith was not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the heart, a light illuminated in the heart.”²⁹ Academics could go on “chattering about the mystery of the Trinity” but the meaning of the doctrine was not the relations of the three Persons to one another but “what they are to us.”³⁰ The Incarnation expressed the mystery of the new birth of an individual Christian, when Christ became “the King of the heart.” This emotive type of spirituality had also surfaced in the Roman Catholic Church in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which established itself in the face of much opposition from the Jesuits and the establishment, who were suspicious of its frequently mawkish sentimentality. It has survived to the present day: many Roman Catholic churches contain a statue of Christ baring his breast to display a bulbous heart surrounded by a nimbus of flames. It was the mode in which he had appeared to Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647–90) in her convent in Paray-le-Monial, France. There is no resemblance between this Christ and the abrasive figure of the Gospels. In his whining self-pity, he shows the dangers of concentrating on the heart to the exclusion of the head. In 1682 Marguerite-Marie recalled that Jesus appeared to her at the beginning of Lent:

玛格丽特-玛丽是一位极度神经质的女性，她坦言自己厌恶性，患有饮食失调症，并沉溺于不健康的受虐行为，以此来证明她对圣心的“爱”。她展现了单纯的心灵信仰是如何误入歧途的。在她眼中，基督往往不过是她愿望的实现，圣心弥补了她从未体验过的爱：“你将永远是它所爱的门徒，是它快乐的玩物，是它愿望的牺牲品，”耶稣告诉她。“它将是你所有欲望的唯一满足；祂必修理并补足你的缺陷，并替你履行你的义务。” ³²这种只关注耶稣这个人的虔诚，只不过是一种投射，它使基督徒陷入神经质的自我中心主义之中。

A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of sex, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy masochistic acts to prove her “love” for the Sacred Heart, Marguerite-Marie shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry. Her Christ is often nothing more than a wish fulfillment, whose Sacred Heart compensates her for the love she had never experienced: “You shall be for ever Its beloved disciple, the sport of Its good pleasure and the victim of Its wishes,” Jesus tells her. “It shall be the sole delight of all your desires; It will repair and supply for your defects, and discharge your obligations for you.”³² Concentrating solely on Jesus the man, such a piety is simply a projection which imprisons the Christian in a neurotic egotism.

我们显然已远离启蒙运动时期冷静的理性主义，然而，心灵的宗教，在其最佳状态下，与自然神论之间确实存在某种联系。例如，康德在柯尼斯堡长大，信奉虔敬派，而津岑多夫也出身于这个路德教派。康德提出的在纯粹理性框架内建立宗教的主张，与虔敬派坚持认为宗教“根植于灵魂的本质之中” ³³，而非建立在专制教会教义所规定的启示之上，有着异曲同工之妙。据说，当康德因其激进的宗教观而闻名时，他曾安慰他的虔敬派仆人说，他只是“摧毁了教条，为信仰腾出了空间” ³⁴ 。约翰·卫斯理对启蒙运动着迷，尤其认同自由的理想。他对科学技术很感兴趣，曾涉猎电学实验，并认同启蒙运动时期对人性以及进步可能性的乐观态度。美国学者阿尔伯特·C·奥特勒指出，这种新的心灵宗教和启蒙运动的理性主义都反建制，都对外部权威抱有不信任感；两者都站在现代人一边，反对古代人；两者都憎恶非人道行为，热衷于慈善事业。事实上，激进的虔诚似乎为启蒙运动的理想在犹太人和基督徒中扎根铺平了道路。这些极端运动之间存在着惊人的相似之处。许多教派似乎都通过触犯宗教禁忌来应对当时的巨大变革。有些教派被视为亵渎神明；有些被贴上无神论的标签；而另一些教派的领袖则自称是上帝的化身。许多教派都带有弥赛亚式的色彩，宣称一个全新的世界即将到来。

We are clearly far from the cool rationalism of the Enlightenment, yet there was a connection between the religion of the heart, at its best, and Deism. Kant, for example, had been brought up in Königsburg as a Pietist, the Lutheran sect in which Zinzendorf also had his roots. Kant’s proposals for a religion within the bounds of unaided reason is akin to the Pietist insistence on a religion “laid down in the very constitution of the soul”³³ rather than in a revelation enshrined in the doctrines of an authoritarian church. When he became known for his radical view of religion, Kant is said to have reassured his Pietist servant by telling him that he had only “destroyed dogma to make room for faith.”³⁴ John Wesley was fascinated by the Enlightenment and was especially sympathetic to the ideal of liberty. He was interested in science and technology, dabbled in electrical experiments and shared the optimism of the Enlightenment about human nature and the possibility of progress. The American scholar Albert C. Outler points out that the new religion of the heart and the rationalism of the Enlightenment were both antiestablishment and both mistrusted external authority; both ranged themselves with the moderns against the ancients, and both shared a hatred of inhumanity and an enthusiasm for philanthropy. Indeed, it seems that a radical piety actually paved the way for the ideals of the Enlightenment to take root among Jews as well as Christians. There is a remarkable similarity in some of these extreme movements. Many of these sects seemed to respond to the immense changes of the period by violating religious taboos. Some appeared blasphemous; some were dubbed atheistic, while others had leaders who actually claimed to be incarnations of God. Many of these sects were Messianic in tone and proclaimed the imminent arrival of a wholly new world.

在奥利弗·克伦威尔领导的清教徒政府统治下，英国曾爆发过一股末世狂热，尤其是在1649年查理一世国王被处决之后。清教徒当局难以控制军队和普通民众中爆发的宗教狂热，许多人相信“主的日子”即将到来。上帝将按照《圣经》的应许，将圣灵倾注于他所有的子民，并在英格兰最终建立他的王国。克伦威尔本人似乎也抱有类似的希望，就像那些在17世纪20年代定居新英格兰的清教徒一样。1649年，杰拉德·温斯坦利在科巴姆附近建立了他的“掘地者”社区。在萨里郡，人们决心将人类恢复到亚当耕耘伊甸园时的原始状态：在这个新的社会里，私有财产、阶级区分和人类权威都将消亡。最早的贵格会教徒——乔治·福克斯、詹姆斯·内勒及其追随者——宣扬所有人都可以直接接近上帝。每个人内心都有一盏明灯，一旦发现并培育它，每个人，无论阶级或地位，都能在世上获得救赎。福克斯本人为他的贵格会宣扬和平主义、非暴力和彻底的平等主义。早在巴黎人民攻占巴士底狱约140年前，对自由、平等和博爱的希望就已经在英国萌芽。

There had been an outbreak of apocalyptic excitement in England under the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell, especially after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The Puritan authorities had found it difficult to control the religious fervor that erupted in the army and among the ordinary people, many of whom believed that the Day of the Lord was at hand. God would pour his Spirit on all his people, as promised in the Bible, and establish his Kingdom definitively in England. Cromwell himself seems to have entertained similar hopes, as had those Puritans who had settled in New England during the 1620s. In 1649 Gerard Winstanley had founded his community of “Diggers” near Cobham in Surrey, determined to restore mankind to its original state when Adam had tilled the Garden of Eden: in this new society, private property, class distinction and human authority would wither away. The first Quakers—George Fox and James Naylor and their disciples—preached that all men and women could approach God directly. There was an Inner Light within each individual, and once it had been discovered and nurtured, everybody, irrespective of class or status, could achieve salvation here on earth. Fox himself preached pacifism, nonviolence and a radical egalitarianism for his Society of Friends. Hope for liberty, equality and fraternity had surfaced in England some 140 years before the people of Paris stormed the Bastille.

这种新宗教精神最极端的例子与中世纪晚期被称为“自由精神兄弟会”的异端分子有很多共同之处。正如英国历史学家诺曼·科恩在《追求千禧年：中世纪的革命千禧年主义者和神秘无政府主义者》一书中解释的那样，自由精神兄弟会的敌人指责他们是泛神论者。他们“毫不犹豫地说：‘上帝就是一切’，‘上帝存在于每一块石头里，存在于人体的每一个肢体里，正如存在于圣餐饼里一样’，‘一切受造之物都是神圣的’。” ³⁵这是一种对普罗提诺思想的重新诠释。万物的永恒本质源于“一”，它是神圣的。一切存在之物都渴望回归其神圣源头，最终将被上帝重新吸收：甚至三位一体的三个位格最终也将融入原始的统一体之中。救赎是通过认识到自身在世间的神性而实现的。莱茵河附近一位隐士的住所中发现的一篇由一位弟兄所著的论文解释道：“神圣的本质就是我的本质，我的本质就是神圣的本质。”弟兄们反复强调：“每个理性的生物在其本性中都是蒙福的。” ³⁶ 这与其说是一种哲学信条，不如说是一种超越人类局限的热切渴望。正如斯特拉斯堡主教所说，弟兄们“声称他们本性就是神，没有任何区别。他们相信一切神圣的完美都存在于他们之中，他们是永恒的，并且存在于永恒之中。” ³⁷

The most extreme examples of this new religious spirit had much in common with the late medieval heretics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit. As the British historian Norman Cohn explains in The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, the Brethren were accused by their enemies of pantheism. They “did not hesitate to say: ‘God is all that is,’ ‘God is in every stone and in each limb of the human body as surely as in the Eucharistic bread.’ ‘Every created thing is divine.’ ”³⁵ It was a reinterpretation of Plotinus’s vision. The eternal essence of all things, which had emanated from the One, was divine. Everything that existed yearned to return to its Divine Source and would eventually be reabsorbed into God: even the three Persons of the Trinity would finally be submerged into the primal Unity. Salvation was achieved by the recognition of one’s own divine nature here on earth. A treatise by one of the Brethren, found in a hermit’s cell near the Rhine, explained: “The divine essence is my essence and my essence is the divine essence.” The Brethren repeatedly asserted: “Every rational creature is in its nature blessed.”³⁶ It was not a philosophical creed so much as a passionate longing to transcend the limits of humanity. As the Bishop of Strasbourg said, the Brethren “say they are God by nature, without any distinction. They believe that all divine perfections are in them, that they are eternal and in eternity.”³⁷

科恩认为，克伦威尔统治时期英国的极端基督教派别，例如贵格会、平等派和狂热派，是十四世纪自由精神异端的复兴。当然，这并非有意为之，但这些十七世纪的狂热分子各自独立地形成了一种泛神论的观点，很难不将其视为斯宾诺莎即将阐述的哲学泛神论的通俗版本。温斯坦利可能根本不相信存在一位超越的上帝，尽管他——像其他激进分子一样——对此并不情愿。他试图用概念性的语言来阐述自己的信仰。这些革命性的教派中，没有一个真正相信他们的救赎源于历史上的耶稣所成就的赎罪。对他们而言，基督是一种弥漫于社群成员之中的存在，几乎与圣灵无异。所有人都认同预言仍然是接近上帝的主要途径，并且圣灵的直接启示优于既定宗教的教义。福克斯教导他的贵格会教徒在静默中等候上帝，这种静默让人联想到希腊的静修主义或中世纪哲学家的否定神学。三位一体的旧观念正在瓦解：这种内在的神圣存在无法被分割成三个位格。它的标志是合一，这体现在各个社群的团结和平等主义之中。与弟兄会一样，一些狂热派信徒也认为自己是神：有些人甚至自称是基督或上帝的新化身。他们自诩为弥赛亚，宣扬革命性的教义和新的世界秩序。因此，在他们长老会批评者托马斯·爱德华兹的论战性论文《Gangraena or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the sectarians of this time》（1640年）中，他总结了狂热派的信仰：

Cohn argues that extremist Christian sects in Cromwell’s England, such as the Quakers, the Levelers and the Ranters, were a revival of the fourteenth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. It was not a conscious revival, of course, but these seventeenth-century enthusiasts had independently arrived at a pantheistic vision which it is hard not to see as a popular version of the philosophical pantheism that would shortly be expounded by Spinoza. Winstanley probably did not believe in a transcendent God at all, though he—like the other radicals—was reluctant to formulate his faith in conceptual terms. None of these revolutionary sects really believed that they owed their salvation to the atonement wrought by the historical Jesus. The Christ who mattered to them was a presence diffused through the members of the community which was virtually indistinguishable from the Holy Spirit. All agreed that prophecy was still the prime means of approaching God and that direct inspiration by the Spirit was superior to the teaching of the established religions. Fox taught his Quakers to wait upon God in a silence that was reminiscent of Greek hesychasm or the via negativa of the medieval philosophers. The old idea of a Trinitarian God was disintegrating: this immanent divine presence could not be divided into three persons. Its hallmark was Oneness, reflected in the unity and egalitarianism of the various communities. Like the Brethren, some of the Ranters thought of themselves as divine: some claimed to be Christ or a new incarnation of God. As Messiahs, they preached a revolutionary doctrine and a new world order. Thus in his polemical tract Gangraena or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectarians of this time (1640), their Presbyterian critic Thomas Edwards summarized the beliefs of the Ranters:

与斯宾诺莎一样，狂热派也被指控为无神论者。他们在自由主义信条中刻意打破基督教禁忌，并亵渎地宣称神与人之间并无区别。并非人人都能像康德或斯宾诺莎那样进行科学抽象思考，但在狂热派的自我标榜或贵格会的“内在之光”中，我们或许能看到一种与一个世纪后法国革命者将理性女神奉入先贤祠时所表达的愿望相似的追求。

Like Spinoza, the Ranters were accused of atheism. They deliberately broke Christian taboos in their libertarian creed and blasphemously claimed that there was no distinction between God and man. Not everybody was capable of the scientific abstraction of Kant or Spinoza, but in the self-exaltation of the Ranters or the Inner Light of the Quakers it is possible to see an aspiration that was similar to that expressed a century later by the French revolutionaries who enthroned the Goddess of Reason in the Panthéon.

一些狂热分子自称是弥赛亚，是……的转世。上帝，祂将建立新的王国。我们所掌握的关于他们生平的记载表明，在某些情况下，他们患有精神疾病，但他们似乎仍然吸引了一批追随者，显然是为了满足当时英国人的精神和社会需求。例如，威廉·富兰克林，一位受人尊敬的户主，在1646年他的家人遭受瘟疫侵袭后，精神失常。他宣称自己是上帝和基督，这令他的基督徒同胞们感到震惊，但后来他又否认了，并请求原谅。他似乎神智清醒，但他仍然抛弃了妻子，开始与其他女人同寝，过着看似声名狼藉的乞丐生活。其中一位名叫玛丽·加德伯里的女子开始看到异象并听到声音，预言一个新的社会秩序将废除所有阶级差别。她接受富兰克林为她的主和基督。他们似乎吸引了一些门徒，但在1650年被捕，遭到鞭打并被关押在布里德韦尔监狱。大约在同一时期，一位名叫约翰·罗宾斯的人也被尊为上帝：他自称是上帝之父，并相信他的妻子不久将生下世界的救世主。

Several of the Ranters claimed to be the Messiah, a reincarnation of God, who was to establish the new Kingdom. The accounts that we have of their lives suggest mental disorder in some cases, but they still seem to have attracted a following, obviously addressing a spiritual and social need in the England of their time. Thus William Franklin, a respectable householder, became mentally ill in 1646 after his family had been smitten by plague. He horrified his fellow Christians by declaring himself to be God and Christ, but later recanted and begged pardon. He seemed in full possession of his faculties, but he still left his wife and began to sleep with other women, leading an apparently disreputable, mendicant life. One of these women, Mary Gadbury, began to see visions and hear voices, prophesying a new social order which would abolish all class distinctions. She embraced Franklin as her Lord and Christ. They seem to have attracted a number of disciples but in 1650 were arrested, whipped and imprisoned in Bridewell. At about the same time, one John Robbins was also revered as God: he claimed to be God the Father and believed that his wife would shortly give birth to the Savior of the world.

一些历史学家否认罗宾斯和富兰克林等人是狂热分子，他们指出，我们对他们的了解仅限于他们的敌人，而这些敌人可能出于论战目的歪曲了他们的信仰。但一些著名狂热分子，如雅各布·鲍瑟姆利、理查德·科平以及劳伦斯·克拉克森的著作流传至今，展现了同样的复杂思想：他们也宣扬革命性的社会信条。鲍瑟姆利在其著作《上帝的光明与黑暗面》（1650年）中，以类似于苏菲派信仰的措辞来描述上帝，即上帝是转向他的人的眼睛、耳朵和手：“哦，上帝，我该如何描述你呢？”他问道，“如果我说我看见你，那只不过是你看见你自己；因为我身上没有任何东西能够看见你，除了你自己：如果我说我认识你，那也只不过是认识你自己。” ³⁹与理性主义者一样，鲍特姆利拒绝三位一体的教义，并且像苏菲派一样，他限定了自己对基督神性的信仰，认为基督虽是神，但上帝不可能只在一个人身上显现：“祂真实而实质地居住在其他人和其他受造物的肉身中，正如祂居住在基督这个人身上一样。” ⁴⁰对一个独立、局部的上帝的崇拜是一种偶像崇拜；天堂不是一个地方，而是基督属灵的临在。鲍特姆利认为，圣经中关于上帝的观念是不充分的：罪不是一种行为，而是一种状态，是我们神性的不足。然而，神秘的是，上帝临在于罪中，罪仅仅是“上帝的黑暗面，仅仅是缺乏光明”。⁴¹鲍特姆利被他的敌人斥为无神论者，但他的观点在精神上与福克斯、卫斯理和津岑堡的观点相差不远，尽管他的表达方式要粗糙得多。像后来的敬虔主义者一样，作为一名卫理公会教徒，他试图将一位变得遥远且冷酷无情的上帝内化于心，并将传统教义转化为宗教体验。他也认同启蒙运动哲学家和那些信奉心灵宗教的人后来所持有的对权威的摒弃以及对人性的乐观态度。

Some historians deny that men like Robbins and Franklin were Ranters, noting that we only hear about their activities from their enemies, who may have distorted their beliefs for polemical reasons. But some texts by notable Ranters like Jacob Bauthumely, Richard Coppin and Laurence Clarkson have survived which show the same complex of ideas: they also preached a revolutionary social creed. In his treatise The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650), Bauthumely speaks of God in terms that recall the Sufi belief that God was the Eye, Ear and Hand of the man who turns to him: “O God, what shall I say thou art?” he asks. “For if I say I see thee, it is nothing but thy seeing of thy selfe; for there is nothing in me capable of seeing thee but thy selfe: If I say I know thee, that is no other but the knowledge of thy selfe.”³⁹ Like the rationalists, Bauthumely rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and, again like a Sufi, qualifies his belief in the divinity of Christ by saying that while he was divine, God could not become manifest in only one man: “He as really and substantially dwells in the flesh of other men and Creatures, as well as in the man Christ.”⁴⁰ The worship of a distinct, localized God is a form of idolatry; Heaven is not a place but the spiritual presence of Christ. The biblical idea of God, Bauthumely believed, was inadequate: sin is not an action but a condition, a falling short of our divine nature. Yet mysteriously, God was present in sin, which was simply “the dark side of God, a mere privation of light.”⁴¹ Bauthumely was denounced as an atheist by his enemies, but his outlook is not far in spirit from Fox, Wesley and Zinzenburg, though it is expressed far more crudely. Like the later Pietists and Methodists, he was trying to internalize a God who had become distant and inhumanly objective and to transpose traditional doctrine into religious experience. He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart.

鲍瑟姆利当时正沉迷于一种极具刺激性和颠覆性的教义——罪的圣洁性。如果上帝是万物，那么罪就什么都不是——劳伦斯·克拉克森和阿拉斯泰尔·科佩等狂热分子也试图通过公然违反当时的性规范或在公共场合咒骂亵渎神明来证明这一论断。科佩尤其以酗酒和吸烟而闻名。一旦他成为一名狂热分子，他便放纵了自己长期以来压抑的咒骂欲望。我们听说他曾在伦敦一座教堂的讲坛上咒骂了一个小时，还曾在一家酒馆里对着女主人破口大骂，以至于她之后几个小时都浑身颤抖。这或许是对清教徒压抑的伦理的一种反动，清教徒过分强调人类的罪恶。福克斯和他的贵格会教徒则坚持认为，罪绝非不可避免。他当然不会鼓励他的教友犯罪，也憎恶狂热者的放荡不羁，但他试图宣扬一种更为乐观的人类学，并恢复平衡。劳伦斯·克拉克森在他的小册子《独眼》中论证说，既然上帝创造万物皆善，“罪”只存在于人的想象之中。上帝在《圣经》中曾宣称，他要使黑暗变为光明。一神论者一直难以接受罪的现实，尽管神秘主义者曾试图探索一种更为全面的视角。诺里奇的朱利安认为罪是“合宜的”，并且在某种程度上是必要的。卡巴拉学者则认为罪神秘地根植于上帝之中。像科佩和克拉克森这样的狂热者的极端自由主义，可以被视为一种粗暴而直接的尝试，旨在摆脱压迫性的基督教——这种基督教曾以其愤怒、复仇的上帝教义恐吓信徒。理性主义者和“开明”的基督徒也试图摆脱将上帝描绘成残酷权威人物的宗教束缚，去发现一个更温和的神。

Bauthumely was flirting with the deeply exciting and subversive doctrine of the holiness of sin. If God was everything, sin was nothing—an assertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current sexual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so fearfully that she trembled for hours afterward. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. Fox and his Quakers insisted that sin was by no means inevitable. He certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more optimistic anthropology and restore the balance. In his tract A Single Eye, Laurence Clarkson argued that since God had made all things good, “sin” only existed in men’s imagination. God himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the darkness light. Monotheists had always found it difficult to accommodate the reality of sin, though mystics had tried to discover a more holistic vision. Julian of Norwich had believed that sin was “behovely” and somehow necessary. Kabbalists had suggested that sin was mysteriously rooted in God. The extreme libertarianism of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorized the faithful with its doctrine of an angry, vengeful God. Rationalists and “enlightened” Christians were also trying to shake off the fetters of a religion which had presented God as a cruel authority figure, and to discover a milder deity.

社会历史学家指出，西方基督教在世界各大宗教中独树一帜，其特点是压制与放纵时期交替出现，且这种交替十分剧烈。他们还指出，压制时期通常与宗教复兴时期重合。启蒙运动时期较为宽松的道德氛围在西方许多地区被维多利亚时代的压制所取代，而维多利亚时代的压制又伴随着更为原教旨主义的宗教信仰的兴起。在当今时代，我们目睹了20世纪60年代的宽松社会逐渐被更为保守的社会所取代。20世纪80年代的清教徒伦理与西方基督教原教旨主义的兴起不谋而合。这是一个复杂的现象，无疑并非由单一原因造成。然而，人们很容易将其与西方人一直难以接受的上帝观念联系起来。中世纪的神学家和神秘主义者或许宣扬慈爱的上帝，但大教堂大门上描绘受难者酷刑的恐怖末日审判图却讲述了另一个故事。正如我们所见，在西方，上帝的概念往往与黑暗和挣扎联系在一起。像克拉克森和科佩这样的狂热分子公然藐视基督教禁忌，宣扬罪恶的神圣性，与此同时，欧洲各国也正掀起巫术狂热。克伦威尔时代的英国激进基督徒也在反抗一个要求过高、令人恐惧的上帝和宗教。

Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among world religions for its violent alternations of periods of repression and permissiveness. They have also noted that the repressive phases usually coincide with a religious revival. The more relaxed moral climate of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity. In our own day, we have witnessed the permissive society of the 1960s giving way to the more puritan ethic of the 1980s, which has also coincided with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the West. This is a complex phenomenon, which doubtless has no single cause. It is, however, tempting to connect this with the idea of God, which Westerners have found problematic. The theologians and mystics of the Middle Ages may have preached a God of love, but the fearful Dooms over the cathedral doors depicting the tortures of the damned told another story. The sense of God has often been characterized by darkness and struggle in the West, as we have seen. Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe were flouting Christian taboos and proclaiming the holiness of sin at the same time as the witchcraft craze was raging in various countries of Europe. The radical Christians of Cromwell’s England were also rebelling against a God and a religion which was too demanding and frightening.

十七、十八世纪在西方兴起的新生基督教往往并不健康，其特点是充满暴力甚至危险的情绪和反复无常。我们可以从18世纪30年代席卷新英格兰的宗教狂热浪潮——大觉醒运动中看出这一点。这场运动的灵感来源于卫斯理兄弟的门徒和同工乔治·怀特菲尔德的福音布道，以及耶鲁大学毕业生乔纳森·爱德华兹（1703-1758）的“地狱之火”布道。爱德华兹在他的文章《康涅狄格州北安普顿的上帝奇妙作为的忠实叙述》中描述了这场觉醒运动。他笔下的教区居民并无特别之处：他们稳重、守规矩、善良，但缺乏宗教热情。他们与其他殖民地的男男女女并无优劣之分。但在1734年，两名年轻人猝然离世，令人震惊。此事（似乎也得到了爱德华兹本人一些令人恐惧的言论的佐证）使整个小镇陷入了宗教狂热之中。人们除了宗教之外什么都不谈；他们停止工作，整日研读《圣经》。大约六个月内，来自社会各阶层的约三百人皈依基督教；有时甚至一周就有五人。爱德华兹认为这股狂热是上帝的直接作为：他是认真的，并非只是说说而已。正如他反复强调的，“上帝似乎打破了他以往在新英格兰的行事方式”，以一种奇妙的方式感动着人们。然而，必须指出的是，圣灵有时也会以一些近乎歇斯底里的症状显现。爱德华兹告诉我们，有时，他们因为敬畏上帝而“崩溃”，并且“陷入了深渊，感到一种罪恶感，他们觉得这种罪恶感已经超出了上帝的怜悯范围”。随后，他们会感到一种同样极度的欣喜，因为他们突然觉得自己得救了。他们常常“放声大笑，泪水也常常如潮水般涌出，夹杂着放声痛哭。有时，他们甚至忍不住大声呼喊，表达他们极大的钦佩之情。” ⁴²显然，我们距离所有主要宗教传统中的神秘主义者所认为的真正启蒙的标志——那种平静自律的状态——还相去甚远。

The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was frequently unhealthy and characterized by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals. We can see this in the wave of religious fervor known as the Great Awakening that swept New England during the 1730s. It had been inspired by the evangelical preaching of George Whitfield, a disciple and colleague of the Wesleys, and the hellfire sermons of the Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Edwards describes this Awakening in his essay “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Northampton, Connecticut.” He describes his parishioners there as nothing out of the ordinary: they were sober, orderly and good but lacking in religious fervor. They were no better or worse than men and women in any of the other colonies. But in 1734 two young people died shockingly sudden deaths, and this (backed up, it would appear, by some fearful words by Edwards himself) plunged the town into a frenzy of religious fervor. People could talk of nothing but religion; they stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all classes of society: sometimes there would be as many as five a week. Edwards saw this craze as the direct work of God himself: he meant this quite literally, it was not a mere pious façon de parler. As he repeatedly said, “God seemed to have gone out of his usual way” of behaving in New England and was moving the people in a marvelous and miraculous manner. It must be said, however, that the Holy Spirit sometimes manifested himself in some rather hysterical symptoms. Sometimes, Edwards tells us, they were quite “broken” by the fear of God and “sunk into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” This would be succeeded by an equally extreme elation, when they felt suddenly saved. They used “to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping. Sometimes they have not been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.”⁴² We are clearly far from the calm control that mystics in all the major religious traditions have believed to be the hallmark of true enlightenment.

这些情绪剧烈的转变一直是美国宗教复兴运动的典型特征。这是一次新生，伴随着剧烈的痛苦和挣扎，是西方人与上帝斗争的新篇章。这场觉醒运动如同瘟疫般蔓延到周围的城镇乡村，正如一个世纪后纽约州被称为“焚毁区”一样，因为那里长期遭受宗教狂热之火的炙烤。爱德华兹注意到，在这种狂热的状态下，他的信徒们觉得整个世界都无比美好。他们爱不释手地研读圣经，甚至忘记了吃饭。或许并不令人意外，他们的热情逐渐消退。大约两年后，爱德华兹注意到，“我们开始明显地感觉到，上帝的灵正在逐渐离开我们。”他这番话并非比喻：在宗教问题上，爱德华兹是一位真正的西方字面主义者。他深信，这次觉醒运动是上帝直接显现在他们中间，是圣灵如同第一次五旬节那样切实的作为。当上帝像他突然降临一样突然离去时，他的位置——再次，毫不夸张地说——被撒旦取代了。超脱之后，随之而来的是自杀式的绝望。首先，一个可怜的人割喉自尽了：“此后，这个城镇和其他城镇的许多人似乎都受到强烈的暗示和敦促，效仿这个人。许多人仿佛被催促着，就像有人对他们说：‘割喉自尽吧，现在是好机会。现在！’”有两个人因“奇怪的、狂热的妄想”而精神失常。 ⁴³之后再也没有人皈依基督教，但那些经历过觉醒运动的人比觉醒运动之前更加平静喜乐，至少爱德华兹是这么认为的。乔纳森·爱德华兹及其信徒所信奉的上帝，以如此反常和痛苦的方式显现自身，显然在对待信徒时，依然像以往一样令人恐惧和专断。情绪的剧烈波动，狂喜和绝望的交替，表明许多美国弱势群体在与“上帝”打交道时难以保持内心的平衡。这也体现了一种我们在科学宗教中也能找到的信念。牛顿认为，上帝直接负责世界上发生的一切事情，无论多么离奇古怪。

These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God. The Awakening spread like a contagion to surrounding towns and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually scorched by the flames of religious fervor. While in this exalted state, Edwards noted that his converts felt that the whole world was delightful. They could not tear themselves away from their Bibles and even forgot to eat. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their emotion died down, and about two years later Edwards noted that “it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us.” Again, he was not speaking metaphorically: Edwards was a true Western literalist in religious matters. He was convinced that the Awakening had been a direct revelation of God in their midst, the tangible activity of the Holy Spirit as on the first Pentecost. When God had withdrawn, as abruptly as he had come, his place was—again, quite literally—taken by Satan. Exaltation was succeeded by suicidal despair. First one poor soul killed himself by cutting his throat and: “After this multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, to do as this person had done. Many had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’ ” Two people went mad with “strange, enthusiastic delusions.”⁴³ There were no more conversions, but the people who survived the experience were calmer and more joyful than they had been before the Awakening, or so Edwards would have us believe. The God of Jonathan Edwards and his converts, who revealed himself in such abnormality and distress, was clearly just as frightening and arbitrary in his dealings with his people as ever. The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealings with “God.” It also shows a conviction that we find also in the scientific religion of Newton that God is directly responsible for everything that happens in the world, however bizarre.

很难将这种狂热而又非理性的宗教信仰与开国元勋们的沉稳冷静联系起来。爱德华兹有很多反对者，他们对“大觉醒”运动持极其批判的态度。自由主义者声称，上帝只会以理性的方式表达自己，而不会以暴力的方式干预人类事务。但在《宗教与美国精神：从大觉醒到革命》一书中，艾伦·海马特认为，“大觉醒”运动的复兴是启蒙运动追求幸福理想的福音派版本：它代表着一种“从‘万物皆引发强烈恐惧’的世界中解脱出来的存在主义解放”。⁴⁴ “大觉醒”运动发生在较为贫困的殖民地，尽管启蒙运动带来了美好的愿景，但那里的人们对今世的幸福却鲜有期待。爱德华兹认为，重生的体验带来了一种与任何自然感觉都截然不同的喜悦感和对美的感知。因此，在觉醒运动中，与神相遇的经历使新世界的启蒙之光得以惠及殖民地中不少成功人士。我们还应记住，哲学启蒙也被体验为一种准宗教式的解放。“启蒙”（éclaircissement ）和“觉醒”（Aufklärung）这两个词都带有明确的宗教含义。乔纳森·爱德华兹的上帝也助长了1775年的革命热情。在复兴主义者眼中，英国已经失去了清教徒革命时期那耀眼的新光，如今显得颓废倒退。正是爱德华兹和他的同伴们引领美国下层阶级迈出了革命的第一步。弥赛亚主义是爱德华兹宗教的核心：人类的努力将加速上帝之国的到来，而这在新世界是触手可及且迫在眉睫的。尽管以悲剧收场，但“觉醒运动”本身却使人们相信，圣经中所描述的救赎进程已经开始。上帝坚定地致力于这项计划。爱德华兹对三位一体教义进行了政治诠释：圣子是“由上帝的理解所创造的神”，因此是新联邦的蓝图；圣灵是“在行动中存在的神”，是最终实现这一宏伟计划的力量。 ⁴⁵在美洲​​新世界，上帝将能够瞻仰他在世上的完美。这个社会将展现上帝自身的“卓越”。新英格兰将成为一座“山巅之城”，成为照亮外邦人的明灯，“映照着升起的耶和华的荣耀，这荣耀必将吸引并迷惑所有人。” ⁴⁶上帝因此，乔纳森·爱德华兹将在英联邦中化身：基督被视为美好社会的化身。

It is difficult to associate this fervid and irrational religiosity with the measured calm of the Founding Fathers. Edwards had many opponents who were extremely critical of the Awakening. God would only express himself rationally, the liberals claimed, not in violent eruptions into human affairs. But in Religion and the American Mind; From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, Alan Heimart argues that the new birth of the Awakening was an evangelical version of the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness: it represented an “existential liberation from a world in which ‘everything awakens powerful apprehension.’ ”⁴⁴ The Awakening occurred in the poorer colonies, where people had little expectation of happiness in this world, despite the hopes of the sophisticated Enlightenment. The experience of being born again, Edwards had argued, resulted in a feeling of joy and a perception of beauty that were quite different from any natural sensation. In the Awakening, therefore, a God-experience had made the Enlightenment of the New World available to more than a few successful people in the colonies. We should also recall that the philosophical Enlightenment was also experienced as a quasireligious liberation. The terms éclaircissement and Aufklärung have definite religious connotations. The God of Jonathan Edwards also contributed to the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1775. In the eyes of the revivalists, Britain had lost the new light that had shone so brightly during the Puritan revolution and now seemed decadent and regressive. It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower classes to take the first steps toward revolution. Messianism was essential to Edwards’s religion: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World. The Awakening itself (despite its tragic finale) made people believe that the process of redemption described in the Bible had already begun. God was firmly committed to the project. Edwards gave the doctrine of the Trinity a political interpretation: the Son was “the deity generated by God’s understanding” and thus the blueprint of the New Commonwealth; the Spirit, “the deity subsisting in act,” was the force which would accomplish this master plan in time.⁴⁵ In the New World of America, God would thus be able to contemplate his own perfections on earth. The society would express the “excellencies” of God himself. The New England would be a “city on the hill,” a light unto the Gentiles “shining with a reflection of the glory of Jehovah risen upon it, which shall be attractive and ravishing to all.”⁴⁶ The God of Jonathan Edwards, therefore, would be incarnated in the Commonwealth: Christ was seen as embodied in a good society.

其他加尔文主义者则走在进步的前沿：他们将化学引入美国的课程体系，爱德华兹的孙子蒂莫西·德怀特将科学知识视为人类最终臻于完美的序曲。他们的上帝并非如美国自由主义者有时所想象的那样，必然意味着晦涩难懂。加尔文主义者不喜欢牛顿的宇宙论，因为牛顿的宇宙论认为，上帝一旦启动了万物，便无事可做。正如我们所见，他们更倾向于一位在世间积极行动的上帝：他们的预定论表明，在他们看来，上帝实际上对世间发生的一切，无论好坏，都负有责任。这意味着，科学只能揭示那位可以在他所创造的一切——自然、文明、物质和精神——的活动中辨识出来的上帝，即使是在那些看似偶然的活动中也是如此。在某些方面，加尔文主义者的思想比自由主义者更具冒险精神。自由主义者反对他们的复兴主义，更倾向于简单的信仰，而不是像惠特菲尔德和爱德华兹这样的复兴主义者布道中那些令他们感到不安的“思辨性强、令人困惑的观念”。艾伦·海马特认为，美国社会反智主义的起源可能并非在于加尔文主义者和福音派人士，而在于像查尔斯·昌西或塞缪尔·昆西这样更为理性的波士顿人，他们更倾向于“更简单明了”的上帝观。 ⁴⁷

Other Calvinists were in the van of progress: they introduced chemistry into the curriculum in America, and Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, saw scientific knowledge as a prelude to the final perfection of humanity. Their God did not necessarily mean obscurantism, as the American liberals sometimes imagined. The Calvinists disliked Newton’s cosmology, which left God with little to do once he had got things started. As we have seen, they preferred a God who was literally active in the world: their doctrine of predestination showed that in their view God was actually responsible for everything that happened here below, for good or ill. This meant that science could only reveal the God who could be discerned in all the activities of his creatures—natural, civil, physical and spiritual—even in those activities which seemed fortuitous. In some respects, the Calvinists were more adventurous in their thinking than the Liberals, who opposed their revivalism and preferred simple faith to the “speculative, perplexing notions” that disturbed them in the preaching of revivalists like Whitfield and Edwards. Alan Heimart argues that the origins of antiintellectualism in American society might not lie with the Calvinists and evangelicals but with the more rational Bostonians like Charles Chauncey or Samuel Quincey, who preferred ideas about God that were “more plain and obvious.”⁴⁷

犹太教内部也曾出现过一些极为相似的发展，这些发展也为理性主义理念在犹太人中的传播铺平了道路，并使许多犹太人得以融入欧洲的非犹太人群体。在1666年这个充满启示意义的年份，一位犹太弥赛亚宣告救赎即将到来，并被世界各地的犹太人欣喜若狂地接受。沙巴泰·泽维于1626年圣殿被毁周年纪念日出生于小亚细亚士麦那一个富裕的塞法迪犹太家庭。随着年龄的增长，他逐渐养成了一些奇怪的习惯，我们今天或许会将其诊断为躁郁症。他时常陷入深深的绝望，那时他会与家人断绝联系，隐居起来。而绝望过后，他又会欣喜若狂，近乎狂喜。在这些“狂躁”时期，他有时会故意且惊人地违反摩西律法：他会在公共场合吃禁食，念诵神圣的名字，并声称自己是受到特殊启示的感召。他坚信自己是人们期盼已久的弥赛亚。最终，拉比们再也无法忍受，于1656年将沙巴泰驱逐出城。他从此在奥斯曼帝国的犹太社区中流浪。在狂躁时期在伊斯坦布尔的一次布道中，他宣布《托拉》已被废除，并高声喊道：“赞美你，我们的主上帝，你竟允许禁忌之事！”在开罗，他娶了一位1648年逃离波兰血腥屠杀的女子，此举引起轩然大波，这位女子当时以卖淫为生。1662年，沙巴泰启程前往耶路撒冷：此时他正处于抑郁期，认为自己一定是被恶魔附身。在巴勒斯坦，他听说有一位名叫内森的年轻博学的拉比，是一位技艺高超的驱魔师，于是便前往加沙，寻找他的住所。

There had been some remarkably similar developments within Judaism which would also prepare the way for the spread of rationalist ideals among Jews and would enable many to assimilate with the Gentile population in Europe. In the apocalyptic year of 1666, a Jewish Messiah declared that redemption was at hand and was accepted ecstatically by Jews all over the world. Shabbetai Zevi had been born on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in 1626 to a family of wealthy Sephardic Jews in Smyrna in Asia Minor. As he grew up he developed strange tendencies which we would perhaps diagnose today as manic-depressive. He had periods of deep despair, when he used to withdraw from his family and live in seclusion. These were succeeded by an elation that bordered on ecstasy. During these “manic” periods, he would sometimes deliberately and spectacularly break the Law of Moses: he would publicly eat forbidden foods, utter the sacred Name of God and claim that he had been inspired to do so by a special revelation. He believed that he was the long-awaited Messiah. Eventually the Rabbis could bear it no longer and in 1656 they expelled Shabbetai from the city. He became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire. During a manic spell in Istanbul, he announced that the Torah had been abrogated, crying aloud: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Who permits the forbidden!” In Cairo he caused scandal by marrying a woman who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland in 1648 and now lived as a prostitute. In 1662 Shabbetai set off for Jerusalem: at this point he was in a depressive phase and believed that he must be possessed by demons. In Palestine he heard about a young, learned Rabbi called Nathan who was a skilled exorcist, so he set out to find him in his home in Gaza.

和沙巴泰一样，纳坦也研习过伊萨克·卢里亚的卡巴拉。当他遇到这位来自士每拿、饱受折磨的犹太人时，他告诉他，自己并非被魔鬼附身：他内心的绝望恰恰证明他就是弥赛亚。当他深入地狱时，他是在与来自彼岸的邪恶势力搏斗，释放着只有弥赛亚才能救赎的“基利波特”（Kelipoth ）领域中的神圣火花。沙巴泰肩负着一项使命：在完成以色列的最终救赎之前，他必须下到地狱。起初，沙巴泰对此百般抗拒，但最终纳坦的雄辩说服了他。1665年5月31日，他突然被一种狂喜攫住，并在纳坦的鼓励下，宣布了自己的弥赛亚使命。一些拉比领袖将这一切斥为危险的无稽之谈，但许多巴勒斯坦犹太人却蜂拥而至，追随沙巴泰。沙巴泰挑选了十二位门徒作为以色列各支派的审判官，这些支派即将重新集结。拿单写信给意大利、荷兰、德国和波兰的犹太社群，以及奥斯曼帝国的各个城市，宣布了这一喜讯，弥赛亚的狂热如同野火般在犹太世界蔓延开来。几个世纪的迫害和排斥使欧洲犹太人与主流社会隔绝，这种不健康的状况使许多人相信，世界的未来完全取决于犹太人。西班牙流亡犹太人的后裔——塞法迪犹太人——深受卢里亚卡巴拉的影响，许多人开始相信末日即将到来。这一切都助长了沙巴泰·泽维的崇拜。在犹太历史上，曾出现过许多弥赛亚的宣称者，但没有一个像沙巴泰·泽维那样获得如此广泛的支持。对于那些对沙巴泰持保留意见的犹太人来说，公开谈论此事变得危险起来。他的支持者来自犹太社会的各个阶层：富人和穷人，受过教育的和未受过教育的。小册子和传单用英语、荷兰语、德语和意大利语传播着这一喜讯。在波兰和立陶宛，人们举行了公开的游行来纪念他。在奥斯曼帝国，先知们走上街头，描述他们所见的异象：沙巴泰端坐在宝座上。一切商业活动都停止了；不祥的是，土耳其的犹太人不再提及他的名字。苏丹的名字从安息日祷文中被替换成了沙巴泰的名字。最终，当沙巴泰于1666年1月抵达伊斯坦布尔时，他因叛乱罪被捕，并被囚禁在加里波利。

Like Shabbetai, Nathan had studied the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. When he met the troubled Jew from Smyrna, he told him that he was not possessed: his dark despair proved that he was indeed the Messiah. When he descended to these depths, he was fighting against the evil powers of the Other Side, releasing the divine sparks in the realm of the kelipoth which could only be redeemed by the Messiah himself. Shabbetai had a mission to descend into hell before he could achieve the final redemption of Israel. At first Shabbetai would have none of this, but eventually Nathan’s eloquence persuaded him. On May 31, 1665, he was suddenly seized with a manic joy and, with Nathan’s encouragement, he announced his Messianic mission. Leading Rabbis dismissed all this as dangerous nonsense, but many of the Jews of Palestine flocked to Shabbetai, who chose twelve disciples to be the judges of the tribes of Israel, which would soon reassemble. Nathan announced the good news to the Jewish communities in letters to Italy, Holland, Germany and Poland, as well as to the cities of the Ottoman empire, and Messianic excitement spread like wildfire through the Jewish world. Centuries of persecution and ostracism had isolated the Jews of Europe from the mainstream, and this unhealthy state of affairs had conditioned many to believe that the future of the world depended upon the Jews alone. The Sephardim, descendants of the exiled Jews of Spain, had taken Lurianic Kabbalah to their hearts, and many had come to believe in the imminent End of Days. All this helped the cult of Shabbetai Zevi. Throughout Jewish history, there had been many Messianic claimants, but none had ever attracted such massive support. It became dangerous for Jews who had their reservations about Shabbetai to speak out. His supporters came from all classes of Jewish society: rich and poor, learned and uneducated. Pamphlets and broadsheets spread the glad tidings in English, Dutch, German and Italian. In Poland and Lithuania there were public processions in his honor. In the Ottoman empire, prophets wandered through the streets describing visions in which they had seen Shabbetai seated upon a throne. All business ceased; ominously, the Jews of Turkey dropped the name of the sultan from the Sabbath prayers and put in Shabbetai’s name instead. Eventually, when Shabbetai arrived in Istanbul in January 1666, he was arrested as a rebel and imprisoned in Gallipoli.

经历了几个世纪的迫害、流放和屈辱之后，希望出现了。世界各地的犹太人都体验到了一种内在的自由和解放，这种自由和解放似乎与卡巴拉学者在沉思神秘的塞菲罗特世界时所体验到的短暂狂喜相似。如今，这种救赎的体验不再是少数特权阶层的专属，而是成为了普遍的财富。犹太人第一次感到自己的生命有了价值；救赎不再是对未来的模糊希望，而是当下真实而充满意义的现实。救赎降临了！这突如其来的转变给人留下了深刻的印象。整个犹太世界的目光都聚焦在加里波利，在那里，沙巴泰甚至给他的俘虏留下了深刻的印象。土耳其维齐尔为他提供了相当舒适的住所。沙巴泰开始在信件上署名：“我是你们的上帝，沙巴泰·泽维。” 但当他被带回伊斯坦布尔受审时，他再次陷入了抑郁之中。苏丹给了他两个选择：要么皈依伊斯兰教，要么死。沙巴泰选择了伊斯兰教，并立即被释放。他获得了皇室年金，并于1676年9月17日去世，表面上是一位忠诚的穆斯林。

After centuries of persecution, exile and humiliation, there was hope. All over the world, Jews had experienced an inner freedom and liberation that seemed similar to the ecstasy that the Kabbalists had experienced for a few moments when they contemplated the mysterious world of the sefiroth. Now this experience of salvation was no longer simply the preserve of a privileged few but seemed common property. For the first time, Jews felt that their lives had value; redemption was no longer a vague hope for the future but was real and full of meaning in the present. Salvation had come! This sudden reversal made an indelible impression. The eyes of the whole Jewish world were fixed on Gallipoli, where Shabbetai had even made an impression on his captors. The Turkish vizier housed him in considerable comfort. Shabbetai began to sign his letters: “I am the Lord your God, Shabbetai Zevi.” But when he was brought back to Istanbul for his trial, he had fallen once again into a depression. The sultan gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death: Shabbetai chose Islam and was immediately released. He was given an imperial pension and died as an apparently loyal Muslim on September 17, 1676.

这则骇人听闻的消息自然令他的支持者们悲痛欲绝，许多人瞬间失去了信仰。拉比们试图将他的记忆从世上抹去：他们销毁了所有能找到的关于沙巴泰的信件、小册子和传单。时至今日，许多犹太人仍然为这场弥赛亚的惨败感到羞愧，难以释怀。拉比和理性主义者都淡化了此事的重要性。然而，近年来，学者们追随已故的格尔松·肖勒姆的脚步，试图理解这一奇异事件及其更深远的后果。^尽管令人震惊，许多犹太人仍然忠于他们的弥赛亚，即便他背弃了信仰。救赎的体验如此深刻，以至于他们无法相信上帝会允许他们受蒙蔽。这是宗教救赎体验凌驾于事实和理性之上的最引人注目的例子之一。面对放弃新生的希望还是接受一位背教的弥赛亚的选择，令人惊讶的是，各个阶层的犹太人中，有相当一部分人拒绝接受残酷的历史事实。加沙的拿单将余生都奉献给了宣扬沙巴泰的奥秘：他皈依伊斯兰教，实际上是延续了他与邪恶势力长达一生的斗争。然而，他又一次被迫违背了他族人最深层的神圣信仰。他深入黑暗领域，解放了邪恶势力。他接受了自己使命的悲剧重担，深入最深的深渊，从内部征服无神论的世界。在土耳其和希腊，大约有两百个家庭仍然忠于沙巴泰：在他去世后，他们决定效仿他的榜样，继续与邪恶作斗争，并于1683年集体皈依伊斯兰教。他们仍然秘密地忠于犹太教，与拉比们保持密切联系，并在彼此家中秘密地聚集在犹太会堂里。1689年，他们的领袖雅各布·奎里多前往麦加朝觐，弥赛亚的遗孀宣称他是沙巴泰·泽维的转世。在土耳其，至今仍有一小群“顿梅”（叛教者），他们表面上过着无可挑剔的伊斯兰教生活，但内心深处却坚定地信奉着犹太教。

Naturally the appalling news devastated his supporters, many of whom instantly lost their faith. The Rabbis attempted to erase his memory from the earth: they destroyed all the letters, pamphlets and tracts about Shabbetai they could find. To this day, many Jews are embarrassed by this Messianic debacle and find it hard to deal with. Rabbis and rationalists alike have downplayed its significance. Recently, however, scholars have followed the late Gershom Scholem in trying to understand the meaning of this strange episode and its more significant aftermath.⁴⁸ Astonishing as it may seem, many Jews remained loyal to their Messiah, despite the scandal of his apostasy. The experience of redemption had been so profound that they could not believe that God had allowed them to be deluded. It is one of the most striking instances of the religious experience of salvation taking precedence over mere facts and reason. Faced with the choice of abandoning their newfound hope or accepting an apostate Messiah, a surprising number of Jews of all classes refused to submit to the hard facts of history. Nathan of Gaza devoted the rest of his life to preaching the mystery of Shabbetai: by converting to Islam, he had continued his lifelong battle with the forces of evil. Yet again, he had been impelled to violate the deepest sanctities of his people in order to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate the kelipoth. He had accepted the tragic burden of his mission and descended to the lowest depths to conquer the world of Godlessness from within. In Turkey and Greece, about two hundred families remained loyal to Shabbetai: after his death they decided to follow his example in order to continue his battle with evil and converted to Islam en masse in 1683. They remained secretly loyal to Judaism, keeping in close touch with the Rabbis and congregating in the clandestine synagogues in one another’s houses. In 1689 their leader Jacob Querido made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and the Messiah’s widow declared that he was the reincarnation of Shabbetai Zevi. There is still a small group of Donmeh (apostates) in Turkey, who live outwardly impeccable Islamic lives but cling passionately to their Judaism in secret.

其他一些安息日信徒虽然没有采取如此极端的做法，但他们仍然忠于他们的弥赛亚和犹太会堂。这些秘密的安息日信徒似乎比人们曾经认为的要多。在十九世纪，许多已经同化或接受了更为自由的犹太教形式的犹太人认为，拥有安息日信徒的祖先是一件可耻的事情，但似乎许多十八世纪杰出的拉比都相信沙巴泰就是弥赛亚。肖勒姆认为，尽管这种弥赛亚主义从未在犹太教中发展成为一场大规模运动，但其规模不容小觑。它对马兰诺人（Marranos）有着特殊的吸引力，这些人曾被迫皈依基督教，但最终又回归了犹太教。背教作为一种神秘现象的概念减轻了他们的罪恶感和悲伤。安息日主义在摩洛哥、巴尔干半岛、意大利和立陶宛的塞法迪犹太社区蓬勃发展。一些人，例如雷焦的本杰明·科恩和摩德纳的亚伯拉罕·罗里戈，是著名的卡巴拉学者，他们与该运动的联系一直秘而不宣。弥赛亚教派从巴尔干半岛传播到波兰的阿什肯纳兹犹太人，他们因东欧日益高涨的反犹主义而士气低落、疲惫不堪。1759年，神秘而阴险的先知雅各布·弗兰克的门徒效仿他们的弥赛亚，集体皈依基督教，但仍然秘密地信奉犹太教。

Other Sabbatarians did not go to these lengths but remained loyal to their Messiah and to the synagogue. There seem to have been more of these crypto-Sabbatarians than was once believed. During the nineteenth century, many Jews who had assimilated or adopted a more liberal form of Judaism considered it shameful to have had Sabbatarian ancestors, but it appears that many outstanding Rabbis of the eighteenth century believed that Shabbetai had been the Messiah. Scholem argues that even though this Messianism never became a mass movement in Judaism, its numbers should not be underestimated. It had a special appeal to the Marranos, who had been forced by the Spanish to convert to Christianity but eventually reverted to Judaism. The notion of apostasy as a mystery assuaged their guilt and sorrow. Sabbatarianism flourished in Sephardic communities in Morocco, the Balkans, Italy and Lithuania. Some, like Benjamin Kohn of Reggio and Abraham Rorigo of Modena, were eminent Kabbalists who kept their link with the movement secret. From the Balkans, the Messianic sect spread to the Ashkenazic Jews in Poland, who were demoralized and exhausted by the escalating anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. In 1759 the disciples of the strange and sinister prophet Jacob Frank followed the example of their Messiah and converted en masse to Christianity, adhering to Judaism in secret.

肖勒姆提出了一个与基督教颇具启发性的类比。大约一千六百年前，另一群犹太人也无法放弃他们对一位丑闻缠身的弥赛亚的希望，这位弥赛亚在耶路撒冷像一个普通罪犯一样死去。圣保罗所说的十字架的丑闻，与背教的弥赛亚的丑闻一样令人震惊。在这两种情况下，门徒们都宣告了一种取代旧犹太教的新形式的诞生；他们接受了一种自相矛盾的信条。基督教认为十字架的失败带来了新的生命，这与……安息日派坚信背教是一个神圣的奥秘。这两个群体都认为麦粒必须在土壤中腐烂才能结果实；他们都认为旧的律法已经失效，被新的圣灵律法所取代。他们都发展出了三位一体和道成肉身的神学观念。

Scholem suggests an illuminating comparison to Christianity. Some sixteen hundred years earlier, another group of Jews had been unable to abandon their hope in a scandalous Messiah, who had died the death of a common criminal in Jerusalem. What St. Paul had called the scandal of the cross was every bit as shocking as the scandal of an apostate Messiah. In both cases, the disciples proclaimed the birth of a new form of Judaism which had replaced the old; they embraced a paradoxical creed. Christian belief that there was new life in the defeat of the Cross was similar to the Sabbatarians’ conviction that apostasy was a sacred mystery. Both groups believed that the grain of wheat had to rot in the earth in order to bear fruit; they believed that the old Torah was dead and had been replaced by the new law of the Spirit. Both developed Trinitarian and Incarnational conceptions of God.

如同十七、十八世纪的许多基督徒一样，安息日信徒相信他们正站在一个新世界的门槛上。卡巴拉学者曾多次论证，在末世，那些在流亡期间被遮蔽的上帝的真正奥秘将会被揭示。安息日信徒相信他们生活在弥赛亚时代，因此他们能够自由地摆脱关于上帝的传统观念，即便这意味着接受一种看似亵渎神明的神学。例如，出生于马兰诺（Marrano，犹太裔）并最初研习基督教神学的亚伯拉罕·卡达佐（Abraham Cardazo，卒于1706年）认为，由于他们的罪孽，所有犹太人注定要背弃信仰。这本应是他们的惩罚。但上帝通过让弥赛亚为他们做出至高的牺牲，拯救了他的子民免于这可怕的命运。他得出了一个令人震惊的结论：在流亡期间，犹太人已经失去了所有关于上帝的真正知识。

Like many Christians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sabbatarians believed that they were standing on the threshold of a new world. Kabbalists had repeatedly argued that in the Last Days the true mysteries of God, which had been obscured during the exile, would be revealed. Sabbatarians who believed that they were living in the Messianic era felt free to break away from traditional ideas about God, even if that meant accepting an apparently blasphemous theology. Thus Abraham Cardazo (d. 1706), who had been born a Marrano and had started by studying Christian theology, believed that because of their sins all Jews had been destined to become apostates. This was to have been their punishment. But God had saved his people from this terrible fate by allowing the Messiah to make the supreme sacrifice on their behalf. He came to the frightening conclusion that during their time in exile, the Jews had lost all true knowledge of God.

如同启蒙运动时期的基督徒和自然神论者一样，卡尔达佐试图剥离他眼中宗教中那些不真实的附加成分，回归圣经的纯粹信仰。人们或许还记得，在公元二世纪，一些基督教诺斯替教徒发展出一种形而上学的反犹主义，他们将耶稣基督的隐秘之神与犹太人残酷的上帝区分开来，后者被认为是世界的创造者。如今，卡尔达佐无意中复兴了这种古老的观念，但却彻底颠覆了它。他还教导说，世间存在两位神：一位是向以色列人显现的神，另一位则是众所周知的神。在所有文明中，人们都证明了第一因的存在：这就是亚里士多德的神，曾被整个异教世界所崇拜。这位神并无宗教意义：他没有创造世界，也对人类毫无兴趣；因此，他并未在圣经中显现，圣经中也从未提及他。第二位神，曾向亚伯拉罕、摩西和众先知显现，与第一位神截然不同：祂从无到有创造了世界，救赎了以色列，并且是以色列的神。然而，在流亡期间，像萨迪亚和迈蒙尼德这样的哲学家被非犹太人包围，并吸收了他们的一些思想。因此，他们混淆了两位神，并教导犹太人两位神是同一位。结果就是，犹太人开始崇拜哲学家们的上帝，就好像他是他们祖先的上帝一样。

Like the Christians and Deists of the Enlightenment, Cardazo was attempting to peel away what he saw as inauthentic accretions from his religion and to return to the pure faith of the Bible. It will be recalled that during the second century, some Christian Gnostics had evolved a kind of metaphysical anti-Semitism by distinguishing the Hidden God of Jesus Christ from the cruel God of the Jews, who was responsible for the creation of the world. Now Cardazo unconsciously revived this old idea but completely reversed it. He also taught that there were two Gods: one who was the God who had revealed himself to Israel and another who was common knowledge. In every civilization people had proved the existence of a First Cause: this was the God of Aristotle, who had been worshipped by the whole pagan world. This deity had no religious significance: he had not created the world and had no interest whatever in humanity; he had, therefore, not revealed himself in the Bible, which never mentions him. The second God, who had revealed himself to Abraham, Moses and the prophets, was quite different: he had created the world out of nothing, had redeemed Israel and was its God. In exile, however, philosophers such as Saadia and Maimonides were surrounded by the goyim and had absorbed some of their ideas. Consequently they had confused the two Gods and taught the Jews that they were one and the same. The result was that the Jews had come to worship the God of the philosophers as though he were the God of their Fathers.

两位神之间有何关联？卡尔达佐发展出一套三位一体神学，以解释这位额外的神祇，同时又不放弃犹太教的一神论。他认为神性由三个位格或“面相”（ parzufim）构成：第一个位格被称为阿提卡·卡迪沙（Atika Kadisha ），即圣洁的古老者，这是第一因。第二个位格源于第一个位格，被称为马尔卡·卡迪沙（Malka Kadisha），他是以色列的上帝。第三个位格是舍金娜（Shekinah），正如伊萨克·卢里亚所描述的那样，他曾被逐出神性。卡尔达佐认为，这“信仰的三个纽带”并非三个完全独立的神，而是神秘地合而为一，因为它们都展现了同一个神性。卡尔达佐是一位温和的安息日信徒。他不认为自己有义务背弃犹太教，因为沙巴泰·泽维（Shabbetai Zevi）已经替他完成了这项痛苦的任务。但是，提出三位一体的理论，就意味着他打破了禁忌。几个世纪以来，犹太人逐渐憎恨三位一体论，认为它是亵渎神明和偶像崇拜。但令人惊讶的是，许多犹太人却被这种禁忌的理念所吸引。随着岁月流逝，世界却没有任何改变，安息日信徒不得不调整他们对弥赛亚的盼望。像尼希米·海姆、塞缪尔·普里莫和乔纳森·艾贝舒茨这样的安息日信徒最终得出结论：1666年时，“神性的奥秘”（sod ha-elohut）尚未完全揭示。正如卢里亚所预言的那样，舍金纳（Shekinah）已经开始“从尘埃中升起”，但尚未回归神性。救赎将是一个渐进的过程，在这个过渡时期，人们可以继续遵守旧约律法并在犹太会堂敬拜，同时秘密地信奉弥赛亚教义。这种修订后的安息日主义解释了为什么许多相信沙巴泰·泽维是弥赛亚的拉比能够在十八世纪继续留在讲坛上。

How did the two Gods relate to one another? Cardazo evolved a Trinitarian theology to account for this additional deity without abandoning Jewish monotheism. There was a Godhead which consisted of three hypostases or parzufim (countenances): the first of these was called Atika Kadisha, the Holy Ancient One. This was the First Cause. The second parzuf, which emanated from the first, was called Malka Kadisha; he was the God of Israel. The third parzuf was the Shekinah, who had been exiled from the Godhead as Isaac Luria had described. Cardazo argued that these “three knots of the faith” were not three entirely separate gods but were mysteriously one, as they all manifested the same Godhead. Cardazo was a moderate Sabbatarian. He did not believe it his duty to apostasize because Shabbetai Zevi had performed this painful task on his behalf. But in proposing a Trinity, he was breaking a taboo. Over the centuries, Jews had come to hate Trinitarianism, which they considered blasphemous and idolatrous. But a surprising number of Jews were drawn to this forbidden vision. As the years passed without any change in the world, Sabbatarians had to modify their Messianic hopes. Sabbatarians like Nehemiah Hayim, Samuel Primo and Jonathan Eibeschütz came to the conclusion that the “mystery of the Godhead” (sod ha-elohut) had not been fully revealed in 1666. The Shekinah had begun to “rise from the dust,” as Luria had foretold, but had not yet returned to the Godhead. Redemption would be a gradual process, and during this time of transition it was permissible to continue to practice the Old Law and worship in the synagogue, while adhering secretly to the Messianic doctrine. This revised Sabbatarianism explained how many Rabbis who believed that Shabbetai Zevi had been the Messiah were able to stay in the pulpits during the eighteenth century.

那些背教的极端分子接受了道成肉身的神学，从而触犯了犹太教的另一项禁忌。他们开始相信沙巴泰·泽维不仅是弥赛亚，而且是上帝的化身。如同基督教一样，这种信仰也是逐渐演变的。亚伯拉罕·卡达佐所传授的教义与圣保罗关于耶稣复活后得荣耀的信仰相似：当救赎在他背教之时开始时，沙巴泰已被提升到三位一体的“帕尔祖菲姆”（ parzufim）之中： “至圣者（Malka Kadisha），愿祂受赞美，升天，沙巴泰·泽维升天，代替祂成为上帝。” ⁴⁹因此，他以某种方式被提升到神圣的地位，并取代了……以色列的上帝，第二个帕尔祖夫。不久，皈依伊斯兰教的顿梅人更进一步，认定以色列的上帝已降临人间，化身为沙巴泰。由于他们也相信自己的领袖都是弥赛亚的转世，因此他们也成为了化身，或许与什叶派伊玛目们的情况颇为相似。所以，每一代叛教者都有一位被认为是神灵化身的领袖。

The extremists who did apostasize adopted a theology of Incarnation, thus breaking another Jewish taboo. They came to believe that Shabbetai Zevi had not only been the Messiah but an incarnation of God. As in Christianity, this belief evolved gradually. Abraham Cardazo taught a doctrine that was similar to St. Paul’s belief in the glorification of Jesus after his resurrection: when the redemption had begun at the time of his apostasy, Shabbetai had been raised to the Trinity of parzufim: “the Holy One [Malka Kadisha] blessed be He, removed himself upward and Shabbetai Zevi ascended to be God in his place.”⁴⁹ He had, therefore, somehow been promoted to divine status and had taken the place of the God of Israel, the second parzuf. Soon the Donmeh, who had converted to Islam, took the idea a step further and decided that the God of Israel had descended and been made flesh in Shabbetai. Since they also came to believe that each of their leaders was a reincarnation of the Messiah, it followed that they became avatars too, in rather the same way, perhaps, as the Shii Imams. Each generation of apostates, therefore, had a leader who was an incarnation of the divine.

雅各布·弗兰克（1726-1791）于1759年带领他的阿什肯纳兹门徒受洗，在其事业之初便暗示自己是上帝的化身。他被誉为犹太教历史上最令人恐惧的人物。他虽然缺乏教育，却以此为傲，但他却能构建出一套黑暗的神话体系，吸引许多感到信仰空虚、无法满足的犹太人。弗兰克宣扬旧约律法已被废除。事实上，所有宗教都必须被摧毁，这样上帝的光辉才能清晰地显现。在他的著作《主的箴言》（ Slowa Panskie）中，他将安息日主义推向了虚无主义的极端。一切都必须被摧毁：“亚当所到之处，皆建城而立；但我所到之处，皆将毁灭，因为我来到世间，只为毁灭和消灭。” ⁵⁰这与基督的一些言论有着令人不安的相似之处，基督也曾声称他来世并非为了带来和平，而是为了带来刀剑。然而，与耶稣和圣保罗不同的是，弗兰克并不打算用任何东西来取代旧有的神圣事物。他的虚无主义信条或许与他同时代的萨德侯​​爵的信条颇为相似。只有堕落到极致，人才能升华到找到至善的上帝。这不仅意味着摒弃一切宗教，还意味着做出“怪异的行为”，从而达到自愿屈辱和彻底无耻的境地。

Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who led his Ashkenazic disciples to baptism in 1759, had implied that he was God incarnate at the very beginning of his career. He has been described as the most frightening figure in the entire history of Judaism. He was uneducated and proud of it but had the ability to evolve a dark mythology that attracted many Jews who had found their faith empty and unsatisfying. Frank preached that the Old Law had been abrogated. Indeed, all religions must be destroyed so that God could shine forth clearly. In his Slowa Panskie (The Sayings of the Lord), he took Sabbatarianism over the edge into nihilism. Everything had to be broken down: “Wherever Adam trod, a city was built, but wherever I set foot all will be destroyed, for I have come into this world only to destroy and annihilate.”⁵⁰ There is a disturbing similarity to some of the sayings of Christ, who had also claimed that he had come to bring not peace but the sword. Unlike Jesus and St. Paul, however, Frank proposed to put nothing in the place of the old sanctities. His nihilistic creed was not too dissimilar, perhaps, to that of his younger contemporary the Marquis de Sade. It was only by descending to the depths of degradation that men could ascend to find the Good God. This meant not only the rejection of all religion but the commission of “strange acts” that resulted in voluntary abasement and utter shamelessness.

弗兰克并非卡巴拉学者，但他宣扬的是卡尔达佐神学的粗浅版本。他认为，安息日三位一体中的三个“帕尔祖夫”（parzufim）分别会在世上由不同的弥赛亚代表。弗兰克称之为“第一位”的沙巴泰·泽维（Shabbetai Zevi）是“善神”的化身，也就是卡尔达佐所说的阿提卡·卡迪沙（Atika Kadisha，神圣的古老者）；弗兰克本人则是第二位“帕尔祖夫” ——以色列之神的化身。第三位弥赛亚，即舍金娜（Shekinah）的化身，将是一位女性，弗兰克称之为“处女”。然而，目前世界正被邪恶势力所奴役。只有当人们接受弗兰克的虚无主义福音时，世界才能得到救赎。雅各的天梯呈V字形：要升到上帝那里，首先必须像耶稣和沙巴台一样降到深渊：“我告诉你们，”弗兰克宣称，“你们知道，基督说过他来是为了将世界从魔鬼的权势中救赎出来，但我来到这里，是为了将它从一切既有的法律和习俗中解救出来。我的任务是消灭这一切，以便仁慈的上帝能够显现自身。” ⁵¹那些渴望找到上帝并摆脱邪恶势力的人，必须一步步跟随他们的领袖坠入深渊，违背他们所奉为至圣的一切律法：^“我告诉你们，所有想成为战士的人都必须摒弃宗教信仰，这意味着他们必须凭借自身的力量获得自由。” ⁵²

Frank was not a Kabbalist but preached a cruder version of Cardazo’s theology. He believed that each of the three parzufim of the Sabbatarian Trinity would be represented on earth by a different Messiah. Shabbetai Zevi, whom Frank used to call “The First One,” had been the incarnation of “the Good God,” who was Cardazo’s Atika Kadisha (the Holy Ancient One); he himself was the incarnation of the second parzuf, the God of Israel. The third Messiah, who would incarnate the Shekinah, would be a woman whom Frank called “the Virgin.” At present, the world was in thrall to evil powers, however. It would not be redeemed until men had adopted Frank’s nihilistic gospel. Jacob’s ladder was in the shape of a V: to ascend to God, one had first to descend to the depths like Jesus and Shabbetai: “This much I tell you,” Frank declared, “Christ, as you know, said that he had come to redeem the world from the power of the devil, but I have come to redeem it from all the laws and customs that have ever existed. It is my task to annihilate all this so that the Good God can reveal himself.”⁵¹ Those who wished to find God and liberate themselves from the evil powers had to follow their leader step by step into the abyss, violating all the laws that they held most sacred: ^UI say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own powers.”⁵²

从弗兰克最后这段话中，我们可以感受到他阴郁的愿景与理性主义启蒙运动之间的联系。那些接受了他教义的波兰犹太人显然发现，他们的宗教无法帮助他们适应在对犹太人而言并不安全的世界中所处的可怕境地。弗兰克死后，弗兰克主义失去了大部分无政府主义色彩，只保留了对弗兰克作为上帝化身的信仰，以及肖勒姆所说的“强烈而光明的救赎感”。 ⁵³他们将法国大革命视为上帝为他们显灵的迹象：他们放弃了反律主义，转而投身政治行动，梦想着一场能够重建世界的革命。同样，皈依伊斯兰教的顿梅犹太人在二十世纪初常常积极参与青年土耳其党的活动，许多人完全融入了凯末尔·阿塔图尔克的世俗土耳其。所有安息日信徒对外部宗教仪式的敌意，在某种意义上是对犹太隔离区生存环境的一种反抗。安息日主义曾被视为一种落后、晦涩的宗教，但它却帮助他们摆脱了旧有的束缚，并使他们更容易接受新思想。那些表面上忠于犹太教的温和派安息日主义者，往往是犹太启蒙运动（哈斯卡拉运动）的先驱；他们也积极参与了19世纪改革派犹太教的创建。这些改革派启蒙运动者常常持有新旧思想的奇特融合体。例如，大约在1800年，布拉格的约瑟夫·韦特就曾表示，他的偶像是摩西·门德尔松、伊曼努尔·康德、沙巴泰·泽维和伊萨克·卢里亚。并非所有人都能通过科学和哲学的艰难道路迈向现代：激进的基督徒和犹太人的神秘主义信条，使他们能够通过触及内心深处更原始的领域，走向一种他们过去曾认为令人厌恶的世俗主义。有些人接受了新的、亵渎神明的上帝观念，使他们的孩子能够完全背弃上帝。

In this last saying, we can sense the connection between Frank’s dark vision and the rationalist Enlightenment. The Polish Jews who had adopted his gospel had clearly found their religion unable to help them to adjust to their appalling circumstances in a world that was not safe for Jews. After Frank’s death, Frankism lost much of its anarchism, retaining only a belief in Frank as God incarnate and what Scholem calls an “intense, luminous feeling of salvation.”⁵³ They had seen the French Revolution as a sign of God on their behalf: they abandoned their antinomianism for political action, dreaming of a revolution which would rebuild the world. Similarly, the Donmeh who had converted to Islam would often be active Young Turks in the early years of the twentieth century, and many assimilated completely in the secular Turkey of Kemal Atatürk. The hostility that all Sabbatarians had felt toward external observance was in one sense a rebellion against the conditions of the ghetto. Sabbatarianism, which had seemed such a backward, obscurantist religion, had helped them to liberate themselves from the old ways and made them susceptible to new ideas. The moderate Sabbatarians, who had remained outwardly loyal to Judaism, were often pioneers in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah); they were also active in the creation of Reform Judaism during the nineteenth century. Often these reforming maskilim had ideas that were a strange amalgam of old and new. Thus Joseph Wehte of Prague, who was writing in about 1800, said that his heroes were Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Shabbetai Zevi and Isaac Luria. Not everybody could make his way into modernity via the difficult paths of science and philosophy: the mystical creeds of radical Christians and Jews enabled them to work toward a secularism that they would once have found abhorrent by addressing the deeper, more primitive regions of the psyche. Some adopted new and blasphemous ideas of God that would enable their children to abandon him altogether.

在雅各布·弗兰克发展其虚无主义福音的同时，其他波兰犹太人找到了截然不同的弥赛亚。自1648年大屠杀以来，波兰犹太人经历了与西班牙塞法迪犹太人流亡一样剧烈的流离失所和士气低落的创伤。波兰许多最有学识、最虔诚的犹太家庭要么惨遭杀害，要么迁往相对安全的西欧。成千上万的犹太人流离失所，许多人沦为流浪者，在城镇间漂泊，无法定居。留下的拉比们往往才华平庸，他们让经学院庇护自己，免受外界残酷现实的侵扰。四处游荡的卡巴拉学者们谈论着“阿赫拉·西特拉”（achra sitra，意为“彼岸”）世界的黑暗魔咒，认为那里与上帝隔绝。沙巴泰·泽维惨案也加剧了普遍的幻灭感和迷茫。一些乌克兰犹太人受到了基督教虔敬运动的影响，这种运动也曾在俄罗斯东正教中兴起。犹太人开始发展出一种类似的灵恩派宗教。有报道称，一些犹太人在祈祷时会陷入狂喜，放声歌唱，拍手叫好。在 18 世纪 30 年代，这些狂热分子中的一位脱颖而出，成为这种犹太教心灵宗教的无可争议的领袖，并创立了被称为哈西德教派的学派。

At the same time as Jacob Frank was evolving his nihilistic gospel, other Polish Jews had found a very different Messiah. Since the pogroms of 1648, Polish Jewry had undergone a trauma of dislocation and demoralization that was as intense as the exile of the Sephardim from Spain. Many of the most learned and spiritual Jewish families of Poland had either been killed or had migrated to the comparative safety of Western Europe. Tens of thousands of Jews had been displaced and many had become wanderers, roaming from town to town, barred from permanent settlement. The Rabbis who remained were often of low caliber and had allowed the house of study to shield them from the grim reality of the world outside. Wandering Kabbalists spoke of the demonic darkness of the world of the achra sitra, the Other Side, which was separated from God. The Shabbetai Zevi disaster had also contributed to the general disillusion and anomie. Some Jews of the Ukraine had been affected by the Christian Pietist movements, which had also sprung up in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Jews had started to produce a similar kind of charismatic religion. There were reports of Jews falling into ecstasy, breaking into song and clapping their hands during prayer. During the 1730s one of these ecstatics emerged as the undisputed leader of this Jewish religion of the heart and founded the school known as Hasidism.

以色列·本·埃利泽并非学者。他更喜欢在林间漫步，唱歌给孩子们讲故事，而不是研读《塔木德》。他和妻子在波兰南部喀尔巴阡山脉的一间小屋里过着极其贫困的生活。他曾一度挖石灰卖给附近城镇的居民。后来，他和妻子又开了一家旅店。最终，在他大约三十六岁的时候，他宣布自己成为了一名信仰疗愈师和驱魔师。他走遍波兰的各个村庄，用草药、护身符和祈祷治愈农民和镇民的疾病。当时有很多自称奉上帝之名治愈病人的“疗愈师”。以色列就这样成为了“巴尔·谢姆·托夫”（Baal Shem Tov），即“善名大师”。尽管他从未接受过任何正式的任命，他的追随者们开始称他为拉比以色列·巴尔·谢姆·托夫，或者简称他为“贝什特”（Besht）。大多数治疗师满足于魔法，但贝什特也是一位神秘主义者。沙巴泰·泽维事件让他意识到将神秘主义与弥赛亚主义结合起来的危险性，于是他回归到早期的卡巴拉教义，这种教义并非为精英阶层所用，而是面向所有人。贝什特并没有将神圣火花降临人间视为灾难，而是教导他的哈西德信徒们要看到光明的一面。这些火花存在于万物之中，这意味着整个世界都充满了上帝的存在。虔诚的犹太人可以在日常生活中最细微的举动中体验到上帝——无论是在吃饭、喝水还是与妻子亲热时——因为神圣火花无处不在。因此，人们身边并非围绕着成群的恶魔，而是一位充满神圣的上帝。他希望犹太人能够充满信心和喜悦地接近他，他存在于每一阵风和每一根草叶之中。

Israel ben Eliezer was not a scholar. He preferred to walk in the woods, singing songs and telling stories to children, to studying the Talmud. He and his wife lived in abject poverty in southern Poland in a hut in the Carpathian Mountains. For a time he dug lime and sold it to the people of the nearby town. Then he and his wife became innkeepers. Finally, when he was about thirty-six years old, he announced that he had become a faith healer and an exorcist. He journeyed through the villages of Poland, healing the illnesses of the peasants and townsfolk with herbal remedies, amulets and prayers. There were many healers at this time, who claimed to cure the afflicted in the Name of the Lord. Israel had thus now become a Baal Shem Tov, a Master of the Good Name. Even though he had never been ordained, his followers began to call him Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, or, simply, the Besht. Most of the healers were content with magic, but the Besht was also a mystic. The Shabbetai Zevi episode had convinced him of the dangers of combining mysticism with Messianism, and he returned to an earlier form of Kabbalism, which was not to be for an elite, however, but for everybody. Instead of seeing the fall of the divine sparks to the world as a disaster, the Besht taught his Hasidim to look on the bright side. These sparks were lodged in every item of creation, and this meant that the whole world was filled with the presence of God. A devout Jew could experience God in the tiniest action of his daily life—while he was eating, drinking or making love to his wife—because the divine sparks were everywhere. Men and women were not surrounded by hosts of demons, therefore, but by a God who was present in every gust of wind or blade of grass: he wanted Jews to approach him with confidence and joy.

贝什特放弃了卢里亚拯救世界的宏伟计划。哈西德派信徒的责任仅仅是将困于他个人世界——妻子、仆人、家具和食物——中的火花重新连接起来。正如贝什特的弟子之一希勒尔·泽特林所解释的那样，哈西德派信徒对他所处的特定环境负有独特的责任，而这责任只有他才能履行：“每个人都是他自己世界的救赎者。他只看到他，也只有他应该看到的东西，只感受到他被赋予的感受。” ⁵⁴卡巴拉学者设计了一种专注（devekuth）的修行方法，帮助神秘主义者无论身处何处都能感知到上帝的存在。正如一位十七世纪萨法德的卡巴拉学者所解释的那样，神秘主义者应该独处，暂时放下对《托拉》的学习，“想象舍金纳之光在他们头顶上方，仿佛它环绕着他们，而他们正坐在光明之中。” ⁵⁵这种对上帝临在的感知使他们陷入了一种颤抖而狂喜的境界。贝什特教导他的追随者，这种狂喜并非特权神秘精英的专属，而是每个犹太人都有义务实践“德维库特”（devekuth），并意识到上帝无处不在的存在：事实上，未能实践“德维库特”就等同于偶像崇拜，否认除上帝之外任何事物的真实存在。这使贝什特与当时的统治阶级产生了冲突，后者担心犹太人会放弃对《托拉》的学习，转而投身于这些可能危险且怪异的宗教活动。

The Besht abandoned Luria’s grand schemes for the salvation of the world. The Hasid was simply responsible for reuniting the sparks trapped in the items of his personal world—in his wife, his servants, furniture and food. As Hillel Zeitlin, one of the Besht’s disciples, explained, the Hasid has a unique responsibility to his particular environment, which he alone can perform: “Every man is a redeemer of a world that is all his own. He beholds only what he, and only he, ought to behold and feels only what he is personally singled out to feel.”⁵⁴ Kabbalists had devised a discipline of concentration (devekuth) which helped mystics to become aware of the presence of God wherever they turned. As a seventeenth-century Kabbalist of Safed had explained, mystics should sit in solitude, take time off from the study of Torah and “imagine the light of the Shekinah above their heads, as though it were flowing all around them and they were sitting in the midst of light.”⁵⁵ This sense of God’s presence had brought them to a tremulous, ecstatic joy. The Besht taught his followers that this ecstasy was not reserved for the privileged mystical elite but that every Jew had a duty to practice devekuth and become aware of the all-pervasive presence of God: in fact failure in devekuth was tantamount to idolatry, a denial that nothing truly exists apart from God. This brought the Besht into conflict with the establishment, who feared that Jews would abandon the study of Torah in favor of these potentially dangerous and eccentric devotions.

然而，哈西德教派迅速传播，因为它给心怀不满的犹太人带来了希望：许多皈依者似乎都是曾经的安息日信徒。贝什特不希望他的门徒背弃托拉。相反，他赋予了托拉一种新的神秘主义解释：诫命（ mitzvah ）一词意味着一种纽带。当哈西德教徒在实践“devekuth”（一种神圣的仪式）的同时履行律法中的一条诫命时，他既将自己与​​上帝——万物之源——联系起来，又将他此刻所接触的人或事物中的神圣火花与神性重新连接起来。托拉长期以来一直鼓励犹太人通过履行诫命来圣化世界，而贝什特只是对此进行了神秘主义的诠释。有时，哈西德教徒为了拯救世界，会做出一些令人质疑的举动：他们中的许多人大量吸烟，试图挽救烟草中的火花！梅德齐博日的巴鲁赫（1757-1810），贝什特的另一位孙子，拥有一个富丽堂皇的宫廷，里面摆满了精美的家具和挂毯。他辩解说，他只关心这些华丽装饰中迸发出的火花。装饰。阿普特的亚伯拉罕·约书亚·赫舍尔（卒于1825年）过去常常吃大量的食物，以期从食物中重新获得神圣的火花。 ⁵⁶然而，人们可以将哈西德派的事业视为在残酷而危险的世界中寻找意义的尝试。“德维库特”（devekuth）的修行是一种富有想象力的尝试，旨在揭开世界的面纱，发现其内在的荣耀。这与同时代英国浪漫主义诗人威廉·华兹华斯（1770-1850）和塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治（1772-1834）的想象视野颇为相似，他们都在所见的一切事物中感受到那统一于整个现实的“唯一生命”。哈西德派也意识到，他们所看到的神圣能量贯穿于整个受造世界，尽管饱受流放和迫害的苦难，这股能量依然将世界转化为一个荣耀之地。渐渐地，物质世界变得微不足道，一切都成为一种启示：乌贾利的摩西·泰特尔鲍姆（1759-1841）曾说，摩西看到燃烧的荆棘时，他看到的只是神圣的存在，这神圣的存在燃烧在每一丛荆棘中，并维系着它们的生命。 ⁵⁷整个世界仿佛披上了天光，哈西德派信徒们欣喜若狂，拍手欢呼，放声歌唱。有些人甚至翻跟头，以此表明他们所见的荣耀景象已经彻底颠覆了整个世界。

Hasidism spread quickly, however, because it brought the disaffected Jews a message of hope: many of the converts seem to have been former Sabbatarians. The Besht did not want his disciples to abandon the Torah. Instead he gave it a new mystical interpretation: the word mitzvah (commandment) meant a bond. When a Hasid performed one of the commandments of the Law while practicing devekuth, he was binding himself to God, the Ground of all being, at the same time as he was reuniting the divine sparks in the person or thing he was dealing with at the moment to the Godhead. The Torah had long encouraged Jews to sanctify the world by the performance of the mitzvot, and the Besht was simply giving this a mystical interpretation. Sometimes the Hasidim went to somewhat dubious lengths in their zeal to save the world: many of them took to smoking a great deal to rescue the sparks in their tobacco! Baruch of Medzibozh (1757–1810), another of the Besht’s grandsons, had a splendid court with wonderful furniture and tapestries, which he justified by claiming that he was only concerned for the sparks in these magnificent trappings. Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt (d. 1825) used to eat huge meals to reclaim the divine sparks in his food.⁵⁶ One can, however, see the Hasidic enterprise as an attempt to find meaning in a cruel and dangerous world. The disciplines of devekuth were an imaginative attempt to strip the veil of familiarity from the world to discover the glory within. It was not dissimilar to the imaginative vision of the contemporary English Romantics William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who sensed the One Life that unites the whole of reality in everything they saw. The Hasidim also became aware of what they saw as a divine energy coursing through the whole created world which transformed it into a glorious place, despite the sorrows of exile and persecution. Gradually the material world would fade into insignificance and everything would become an epiphany: Moses Teitelbaum of Ujhaly (1759–1841) said that when Moses had seen the Burning Bush, he had simply seen the divine presence which burns in every single bush and keeps it in existence.⁵⁷ The whole world seemed appareled in celestial light, and the Hasidim would shout with joy in their ecstasy, clapping their hands, and break into song. Some even used to turn somersaults, demonstrating that the glory of their vision had turned the whole world upside down.

与斯宾诺莎和一些基督教激进分子不同，贝什特并非认为万物皆神，而是认为所有存在都存在于神之中，神赋予它们生命和存在。神是维系万物存在的生命力。他不相信哈西德派信徒会通过“德维库特”（devekuth）的修行而成神，甚至与神合一——这种想法在所有犹太神秘主义者看来都过于狂妄。相反，哈西德派信徒会亲近神，并感知到神的存在。他们大多是朴实无华之人，常常言辞夸张，但他们明白自己的神话不应被字面理解。他们更喜欢故事而非哲学或塔木德式的讨论，认为虚构是传达一种与事实和理性几乎无关的体验的最佳载体。他们的愿景是一种富有想象力的尝试，旨在描绘神与人类的相互依存。神并非外在的、客观的现实：事实上，哈西德派信徒相信，在某种意义上，他们是在神消亡之后，通过重建神来创造神。通过觉察自身内在的神性火花，他们便能成为更完整的人。他们再次以卡巴拉的神话术语表达了这一洞见。贝什特的继任者多夫·贝尔说，神与人本为一体：只有当人失去与神分离的意识时，他才能成为神在创世之日所设想的“亚当”（adām） 。其余的存在，并被转化为“原始人的宇宙形象，以西结在宝座上看到了他的形象” ^。58这是犹太教对希腊或佛教关于启蒙信仰的独特表达，启蒙使人类意识到自身超越的维度。

Unlike Spinoza and some of the Christian radicals, the Besht did not mean that everything was God but that all beings existed in God, who gave them life and being. He was the vital force that kept everything in existence. He did not believe that the Hasidim would become divine through the practice of devekuth or even achieve unity with God—such temerity seemed extravagant to all Jewish mystics. Instead, the Hasidim would draw close to God and become aware of his presence. Most were simple, unsophisticated men, and they often expressed themselves extravagantly, but they were aware that their mythology was not to be taken literally. They preferred stories to philosophic or Talmudic discussion, seeing fiction as the best vehicle for conveying an experience which had little to do with facts and reason. Their vision was an imaginative attempt to depict the interdependence of God and mankind. God was no external, objective reality: indeed, the Hasidim believed that in some sense they were creating him by building him up anew after his disintegration. By becoming aware of the Godly spark within them, they would become more fully human. Again, they expressed this insight in the mythological terms of Kabbalah. Dov Baer, the successor of the Besht, said that God and man were a unity: a man would only become adām as God had intended on the day of creation when he lost his sense of separation from the rest of existence and was transformed into the “cosmic figure of primordial man, whose likeness Ezekiel beheld on the throne.”⁵⁸ It was a distinctively Jewish expression of the Greek or Buddhist belief in the enlightenment which made human beings aware of their own transcendent dimension.

希腊人在其关于基督道成肉身和神化的教义中表达了这种洞见。哈西德派发展出了他们自己的道成肉身论。哈西德派的拉比——扎迪克（Zaddik）——成为了他那一代人的化身，是连接天地之间的桥梁，也是神圣临在的代表。正如切尔诺贝利的拉比梅纳赫姆·纳胡姆（1730-1797）所写，扎迪克“确实是上帝的一部分，仿佛与上帝同在”。 ⁵⁹正如基督徒效法基督以求亲近上帝一样，哈西德派也效法他们的扎迪克，这位扎迪克已经升华至上帝，并实践了完美的德维库特（devekuth ，一种修行方式）。他是这种启蒙是可能的活生生的证明。因为扎迪克与上帝亲近，哈西德派可以通过他接近宇宙之主。他们会簇拥在扎迪克周围，聆听他的每一句话，听他讲述贝什特（Besht，犹太教经典）的故事或阐释托拉经文。如同那些狂热的基督教派别一样，哈西德教并非个人主义宗教，而是高度社群化的宗教。哈西德教徒们试图跟随他们的圣人（Zaddik）与他们的导师一同攀登至至高境界。不出所料，波兰较为正统的拉比们对这种个人崇拜感到震惊，因为它完全绕过了长期以来被视为托拉化身的博学拉比。反对者是维尔纳学院院长（Gaon）以利亚·本·所罗门·扎尔曼（Elijah ben Solomon Zalman，1720-1797）。沙巴泰·泽维事件使一些犹太人对神秘主义抱有极大的敌意，而维尔纳学院院长通常被视为理性宗教的捍卫者。然而，他同时也是一位虔诚的卡巴拉学者和塔木德大师。他的亲密弟子沃洛任的哈伊姆拉比赞扬他“对整部《佐哈尔》的精通和深刻理解 ……他以敬畏神圣威严的爱与热情，以圣洁纯净的品格和非凡的虔诚来研习这部经典。” ⁶⁰每当他谈起伊萨克·卢里亚，都会全身颤抖。他拥有奇妙的梦境和启示，却始终坚持研习《托拉》是他与上帝沟通的主要途径。然而，他对梦境在释放深埋于心的直觉方面的作用有着非凡的理解。正如哈伊姆拉比继续说道：“他常说，上帝创造睡眠的目的就在于此，为了让人获得那些即使付出巨大努力也无法获得的洞见，因为当灵魂与肉体结合时，肉体就像一道帷幕，将灵魂与肉体隔开。” ⁶¹

The Greeks had expressed this insight in their doctrine of the Incarnation and deification of Christ. The Hasidim developed their own form of Incarnationalism. The Zaddik, the Hasidic Rabbi, became the avatar of his generation, a link between heaven and earth and a representative of the divine presence. As Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (1730–1797) wrote, the Zaddik “is truly a part of God, and has a place, as it were, with Him.”⁵⁹ Just as Christians imitated Christ in an attempt to draw near to God, the Hasid imitated his Zaddik, who had made the ascent to God and practiced perfect devekuth. He was a living proof that this enlightenment was possible. Because the Zaddik was close to God, the Hasidim could approach the Master of the Universe through him. They would crowd around their Zaddik, hanging on his every word, as he told them a story about the Besht or expounded a verse of Torah. As in the enthusiastic Christian sects, Hasidism was not a solitary religion but intensely communal. The Hasidim would attempt to follow their Zaddik in his ascent to the ultimate together with their master, in a group. Not surprisingly, the more orthodox Rabbis of Poland were horrified by this personality cult, which completely bypassed the learned Rabbi who had long been seen as the incarnation of Torah. The opposition was led by Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), the Gaon or head of the academy of Vilna. The Shabbetai Zevi debacle had made some Jews extremely hostile to mysticism, and the Gaon of Vilna has often been seen as the champion of a more rational religion. Yet he was an ardent Kabbalist as well as a master of Talmud. His close disciple Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin praised his “complete and mighty mastery of the whole of The Zohar … which he studied with the flame of the love and fear of the divine majesty, with holiness and purity and a wonderful devekuth.”⁶⁰ Whenever he spoke of Isaac Luria, his whole body would tremble. He had marvelous dreams and revelations, yet always insisted that the study of Torah was his chief way of communing with God. He showed a remarkable understanding of the purpose of dreams in releasing buried intuition, however. As Rabbi Hayyim continues: “He used to say that God created sleep to this end only, that man should attain the insights that he cannot attain, even after much labor and effort, when the soul is joined to the body because the body is like a curtain dividing.”⁶¹

神秘主义与理性主义之间的鸿沟远没有我们想象的那么大。维尔纳高恩关于睡眠的论述清晰地展现了他对潜意识作用的理解：我们都曾劝朋友“睡一觉”思考某个问题，希望能找到他们在清醒时苦苦思索却始终无法找到的答案。当我们的头脑放松、易于接受时，灵感便会从心灵深处涌现。阿基米德等科学家也曾有过类似的经历，他在浴缸中发现了著名的比热容原理。真正富有创造力的哲学家或科学家，如同神秘主义者一样，必须直面未被创造的现实的黑暗世界和未知的迷雾，并试图将其穿透。只要他们还在与逻辑和概念搏斗，就必然会被既定的观念或思维模式所束缚。他们的发现往往看似来自外部的“馈赠”，他们用“洞察力”和“灵感”来描述一切。因此，厌恶宗教狂热的爱德华·吉本（1737-1794）在罗马卡比托利欧山的废墟中沉思时，经历了一次堪称灵光乍现的时刻，这促使他写下了《罗马帝国衰亡史》。二十世纪历史学家阿诺德·汤因比在评论这一经历时，将其描述为一种“心灵交流”：“他直接感受到历史的洪流如巨流般缓缓流淌过他的身体，而他自己的生命也如同巨浪中的一朵波浪般涌动。”汤因比总结道，这种灵感迸发的时刻类似于“那些有幸体验到这种体验的人所描述的‘至福幻象’”。⁶²阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦也曾声称，神秘主义是“一切真正艺术和科学的播种者”。

There is not such a great gap between mysticism and rationalism as we tend to imagine. The Gaon of Vilna’s remarks about sleep show a clear perception of the role of the unconscious: we have all urged friends to “sleep on” a problem in the hope of finding a solution that has eluded them in their waking hours. When our minds are receptive and relaxed, ideas come from the deeper region of the mind. This has also been the experience of such scientists as Archimedes, who discovered his famous Principle in the bath. A truly creative philosopher or scientist has, like the mystic, to confront the dark world of uncreated reality and the cloud of unknowing in the hope of piercing it. As long as they wrestle with logic and concepts, they are, necessarily, imprisoned in ideas or forms of thought that have already been established. Often their discoveries seem “given” from outside. They speak in terms of vision and inspiration. Thus Edward Gibbon (1737–94), who loathed religious enthusiasm, had what amounts to a moment of vision while musing among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, which impelled him to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Commenting on this experience, the twentieth-century historian Arnold Toynbee described it as a “communion”: “he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of a vast tide.” Such a moment of inspiration, Toynbee concludes, is akin to the “experience that has been described as the Beatific Vision by souls to whom it has been vouchsafed.”⁶² Albert Einstein also claimed that mysticism was “the sower of all true art and science”:

从这个意义上讲，像贝什特这样的神秘主义者所发现的宗教启蒙可以被视为类似于理性时代的一些其他成就：它使较为单纯的男男女女能够通过想象过渡到现代新世界。

In this sense, the religious enlightenment discovered by such mystics as the Besht can be seen as akin to some other achievements of the Age of Reason: it was enabling simpler men and women to make the imaginative transition to the New World of modernity.

18世纪80年代，莱亚迪的施内尔·扎尔曼拉比（1745-1813）认为哈西德教派的情感奔放与理性追求并不冲突。他创立了一种新的哈西德教派，试图将神秘主义与理性沉思融合起来。这种教派后来被称为哈巴德教派。这首藏头诗由上帝的三大属性组成：智慧（Hokhmah）、智慧（Binah）和知识（Da'at）。如同早期将哲学与灵性融合的神秘主义者一样，扎尔曼认为形而上学的思辨是祈祷的必要前提，因为它揭示了理智的局限性。他的方法始于哈西德派的基本观点——上帝存在于万物之中，并通过辩证过程引导神秘主义者认识到上帝是唯一的实在。扎尔曼解释道：“从无限者（愿祂受赞美）的角度来看，所有世界都如同虚无和虚无。” ⁶⁴被造的世界脱离上帝——它的生命力——便不存在。它之所以看起来独立存在，仅仅是因为我们有限的感知，但这只是一种错觉。因此，上帝并非真正存在于另一个现实领域的超越存在：祂并非外在于世界。事实上，上帝超越性的教义是我们头脑的又一种幻觉，我们的头脑几乎无法超越感官印象。哈巴德的神秘修行可以帮助犹太人超越感官知觉，从上帝的视角看待事物。在未开悟的人眼中，世界似乎空无一物，没有上帝：卡巴拉的冥想将打破理性的界限，帮助我们发现存在于我们周围世界中的上帝。

During the 1780s, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyaday (1745–1813) had not found the emotional exuberance of Hasidism alien to the intellectual quest. He founded a new form of Hasidism which attempted to blend mysticism with rational contemplation. It became known as the Habad, an acrostic of the three attributes of God: Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah (Intelligence) and Da’at (Knowledge). Like earlier mystics who had amalgamated philosophy with spirituality, Zalman believed that metaphysical speculation was an essential preliminary to prayer because it revealed the limitations of the intellect. His technique started from the fundamental Hasidic vision of God present in all things and led the mystic, by a dialectical process, to realize that God was the only reality. Zalman explained: “From the standpoint of the Infinite, blessed be He, all the worlds are as if literally nothing and nihility.”⁶⁴ The created world has no existence apart from God, its vital force. It is only because of our limited perceptions that it appears to exist separately, but this is an illusion. God, therefore, is not really a transcendent being who occupies an alternative sphere of reality: he is not external to the world. Indeed, the doctrine of God’s transcendence is another illusion of our minds, which find it almost impossible to get beyond sense impressions. The mystical disciplines of Habad would help Jews to get beyond sensory perception to see things from God’s point of view. To an unenlightened eye the world seems empty of God: the contemplation of Kabbalah will break down the rational boundaries to help us discover the God who is in the world around us.

哈巴德与启蒙运动一样，坚信人类心灵能够抵达上帝，但他采用的是古老的悖论和神秘专注的方法。如同贝什特一样，扎尔曼也坚信任何人都能获得对上帝的启示：哈巴德并非为少数神秘主义者所设。即使人们看似缺乏灵性天赋，他们也能获得启蒙。然而，这并非易事。正如扎尔曼之子，卢巴维奇的拉比多夫·贝尔（1773-1827）在其著作《论狂喜》中所阐述的那样，人们必须从一种令人心碎的自卑感开始。仅仅依靠理性的思考是不够的：它必须辅以自我剖析、研习《托拉》和祈祷。放弃我们对世界的理性和想象偏见是痛苦的，大多数人都不愿放弃自己的观点。一旦超越了这种自我中心主义，哈西德教徒就会意识到，除了上帝之外，别无其他现实。如同体验过“梵我合一”（' fana）的苏菲派信徒一样，哈西德教徒也会达到极乐的境界。贝尔解释说，他会超越自我：“他的整个存在都如此投入，以至于什么都不剩，他完全没有自我意识。” ⁶⁵哈巴德的戒律使卡巴拉成为心理分析和自我认知的工具，教导哈西德教徒一层层深入自己的内心世界，直至抵达自我的中心。在那里，他发现了那位存在着的上帝。唯一真实的实在。心灵可以通过理性和想象力的运用发现上帝，但这并非哲学家和牛顿等科学家所理解的客观上帝，而是一种与自我密不可分的深刻主观实在。

Habad shared the Enlightenment confidence in the ability of the human mind to reach God but did so through the time-honored method of paradox and mystical concentration. Like the Besht, Zalman was convinced that anybody could attain the vision of God: Habad was not for an elite of mystics. Even if people seemed to lack spiritual talent, they could achieve enlightenment. It was hard work, however. As Rabbi Dov Baer of Lubavitch (1773–1827), Zalman’s son, explained in his Tract on Ecstasy, one had to begin with a heartbreaking perception of inadequacy. Mere cerebral contemplation is not enough: it had to be accompanied by self-analysis, study of Torah and prayer. It was painful to give up our intellectual and imaginative prejudices about the world, and most people were deeply reluctant to give up their point of view. Once they had gone beyond this egotism, the Hasid would realize that there was no reality but God. Like the Sufi who had experienced ’fana, the Hasid would achieve ecstasy. Baer explained that he would get beyond himself: “his whole being is so absorbed that nothing remains and he has no self-consciousness whatsoever.”⁶⁵ The disciplines of Habad made Kabbalah a tool of psychological analysis and self-knowledge, teaching the Hasid to descend, sphere by sphere, ever more deeply into his inner world until he reached the center of himself. There he discovered the God that was the only true reality. The mind could discover God by the exercise of reason and imagination, but this would not be the objective God of the philosophes and such scientists as Newton, but a profoundly subjective reality inseparable from the self.

十七、十八世纪是一个充满痛苦与激情的时代，与当时政治和社会的革命动荡遥相呼应。在当时的穆斯林世界，并没有出现类似的景象，尽管西方人很难确定这一点，因为十八世纪的伊斯兰思想研究甚少。西方学者通常轻易地将这一时期视为一个乏味的时期，并认为欧洲经历了启蒙运动，而伊斯兰教则走向了衰落。然而，近年来，这种观点被认为过于简单化。尽管英国在1767年控制了印度，但穆斯林世界尚未充分意识到西方挑战的空前性质。德里的印度苏菲派圣人沙阿·瓦利·乌拉（1703-1762）或许是第一个感受到这种新精神的人。他是一位令人印象深刻的思想家，对文化普世主义持怀疑态度，但认为穆斯林应该团结起来保护他们的文化遗产。尽管他不喜欢什叶派，但他认为逊尼派和什叶派应该找到共同点。他试图改革伊斯兰教法，使其更符合印度的新形势。瓦利·乌拉似乎预见到了殖民主义的后果：他的儿子将会领导一场反对英国的圣战。他的宗教思想较为保守，深受伊本·阿拉比的影响：人若没有真主，就无法充分发挥自身潜能。穆斯林仍然乐于在宗教事务中汲取过往的丰富经验，瓦利·乌拉正是苏菲主义至今仍能激发人们力量的例证。然而，在世界许多地方，苏菲主义已经有些颓废，阿拉伯半岛兴起的一场新的改革运动预示着神秘主义的衰落，这种衰落将成为19世纪穆斯林对真主认知以及伊斯兰教对西方挑战的回应的特征。

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been a period of painful extremity and excitement of spirit which had mirrored the revolutionary turbulence of the political and social world. There had been nothing comparable in the Muslim world at this time, although this is difficult for a Western person to ascertain because eighteenth-century Islamic thought has not been much studied. It has generally been too easily dismissed by Western scholars as an uninteresting period, and it has been held that while Europe had an Enlightenment, Islam went into decline. Recently, however, this perspective has been challenged as being too simplistic. Even though the British had achieved control of India in 1767, the Muslim world was not yet fully aware of the unprecedented nature of the Western challenge. The Indian Sufi Shah Walli-Ullah of Delhi (1703–62) was perhaps the first to sense the new spirit. He was an impressive thinker who was suspicious of cultural universalism but believed that Muslims should unite to preserve their heritage. Even though he did not like the Shiah, he believed that Sunnis and Shiis should find common ground. He tried to reform the Shariah to make it more relevant to the new conditions of India. Walli-Ullah seemed to have had a presentiment of the consequences of colonialism: his son would lead a jihad against the British. His religious thought was more conservative, heavily dependent upon Ibn al-Arabi: man could not develop his full potential without God. Muslims were still happy to draw on the riches of the past in religious matters, and Walli-Ullah is an example of the power that Sufism could still inspire. In many parts of the world, however, Sufism had become somewhat decadent, and a new reforming movement in Arabia presaged the swing away from mysticism that would characterize the Muslim perception of God during the nineteenth century and the Islamic response to the challenge of the West.

如同十六世纪的基督教改革者一样，阿拉伯半岛内志地区的法学家穆罕默德·伊本·瓦哈卜（卒于1784年）也希望恢复伊斯兰教最初的纯洁性，摒弃一切后世的增补。他尤其敌视神秘主义，谴责一切道成肉身神学的思想，包括对苏菲圣人和什叶派伊玛目的崇拜。他甚至反对在麦地那崇拜先知陵墓：任何凡人，无论多么显赫，都不应分散人们对真主的注意力。瓦哈卜成功地使穆罕默德·伊本·沙特（当时的统治者）皈依伊斯兰教。他们来自阿拉伯中部的一个小型公国，共同发起了一场改革，试图重现先知及其同伴的早期乌玛（穆斯林社群）。他们抨击对穷人的压迫、对寡妇和孤儿困境的漠视、不道德的行为以及偶像崇拜。他们还对统治者奥斯曼帝国发动了圣战，坚信阿拉伯人而非土耳其人应该领导穆斯林民族。他们成功地从奥斯曼帝国手中夺取了希贾兹地区的大片领土，土耳其人直到1818年才重新控制这些地区。但这个新兴教派已经深深吸引了伊斯兰世界的许多人。前往麦加朝圣的信徒们也被这种新的虔诚所打动，它似乎比当时许多苏菲主义更加清新、更有活力。在十九世纪，瓦哈比主义逐渐成为伊斯兰教的主流思潮，而苏菲主义则日益边缘化，并因此显得更加怪诞和迷信。如同犹太教徒和基督教徒一样，穆斯林也开始摒弃神秘主义的理想，转而接受一种更为理性的虔诚方式。

Like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century, Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab (d. 1784), a jurist of Najd in the Arabian peninsula, wanted to restore Islam to the purity of its beginnings and get rid of all later accretions. He was particularly hostile to mysticism. All suggestion of an incarnational theology was condemned, including devotion to Sufi saints and the Shii Imams. He even opposed the cult of the Prophet’s tomb at Medina: no mere man, however illustrious, should distract attention from God. Al-Wahhab managed to convert Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of a small principality in Central Arabia, and together they initiated a reform which was an attempt to reproduce the first ummah of the Prophet and his companions. They attacked the oppression of the poor, indifference to the plight of widows and orphans, immorality and idolatry. They also waged a jihad against their imperial masters the Ottomans, believing that Arabs, not Turks, should lead the Muslim peoples. They managed to wrest a sizable portion of the Hijaz from Ottoman control, which the Turks were not able to regain until 1818, but the new sect had seized the imagination of many people in the Islamic world. Pilgrims to Mecca had been impressed by this new piety, which seemed fresher and more vigorous than much current Sufism. During the nineteenth century, Wahhabism would become the dominant Islamic mood and Sufism increasingly marginalized and, consequently, even more bizarre and superstitious. Like Jews and Christians, Muslims were beginning to step back from the mystical ideal and adopt a more rationalistic type of piety.

在欧洲，一些人开始逐渐远离上帝。1729年，一位名叫让·梅斯利埃的乡村牧师去世，他一生品行端正，却是一位无神论者。他留下了一部回忆录，由伏尔泰传播开来。书中表达了他对人性的厌恶以及他对上帝的信仰的否定。梅斯利埃认为，牛顿的无限空间才是唯一永恒的现实：除了物质之外，别无他物。宗教是富人压迫穷人、使其无能为力的工具。基督教尤其以其荒谬的教义而著称，例如三位一体和道成肉身。他对上帝的否定甚至连哲学家们都难以接受。伏尔泰删去了书中明确表达无神论的部分，并将这位牧师的著作改写成了自然神论者。然而，到了17世纪末，虽然无神论者仍然只占极少数，但也有一些哲学家以自称无神论者为荣。这在当时是一个全新的现象。此前，“无神论者”一词一直带有贬义，是用来攻击敌人的极其恶毒的侮辱。而如今，它却开始被当作一种骄傲的象征。苏格兰哲学家大卫·休谟（1711-1776）将这种新经验主义推向了逻辑的极致。他认为，无需超越对现实的科学解释，也无需任何哲学理由去相信任何超出我们感官经验的事物。在《自然宗教对话录》中，休谟驳斥了那种试图从宇宙的设计中证明上帝存在的论证，指出它所依赖的类比论证是站不住脚的。人们或许可以论证，我们在自然界中感知到的秩序指向一位智慧的监督者，但那么，又该如何解释邪恶和显而易见的混乱呢？对此，没有逻辑上的答案，而休谟……1750年写成《对话录》的作者明智地没有将其出版。大约12个月前，法国哲学家德尼·狄德罗（1713-1784）因在《致盲人的一封信》（供有视力的人使用）中提出同样的问题而被监禁，该书向公众全面介绍了无神论。

In Europe a few people were beginning the trend away from God himself. In 1729 Jean Meslier, a country priest who had led an exemplary life, died an atheist. He left behind a memoir which was circulated by Voltaire. This expressed his disgust with humanity and his inability to believe in God. Newton’s infinite space, Meslier believed, was the only eternal reality: nothing but matter existed. Religion was a device used by the rich to oppress the poor and render them powerless. Christianity was distinguished by its particularly ludicrous doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. His denial of God was meat too strong even for the philosophes. Voltaire removed the specifically atheistic passages and transformed the abbé into a Deist. By the end of the century, however, there were a few philosophers who were proud to call themselves atheists, though they remained a tiny minority. This was an entirely new development. Hitherto “atheist” had been a term of abuse, a particularly nasty slur to hurl at your enemies. Now it was just beginning to be worn as a badge of pride. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) had taken the new empiricism to its logical conclusion. There was no need to go beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no philosophical reason for believing anything that lay beyond our sense experience. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume disposed of the argument that purported to prove God’s existence from the design of the universe, arguing that it rested on analogical arguments that were inconclusive. One might be able to argue that the order we discern in the natural world pointed to an intelligent Overseer, but how, then, to account for evil and the manifest disorder? There was no logical answer to this, and Hume, who had written the Dialogues in 1750, wisely left them unpublished. Some twelve months earlier, the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) had been imprisoned for asking the same question in A Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, which introduced a full-blown atheism to the general public.

狄德罗本人否认自己是无神论者。他只是说，他不在乎上帝是否存在。当伏尔泰反对他的书时，他回答说：“我相信上帝，尽管我和无神论者相处得很好…………非常重要的一点是不要把毒芹误认为欧芹；但信不信上帝根本无关紧要。”狄德罗一针见血地指出了问题的本质。一旦“上帝”不再是一种充满激情的主观体验，“他”就不存在了。正如狄德罗在同一封信中所指出的，相信哲学家们所信奉的那位从不干预世事的上帝是毫无意义的。隐秘的上帝变成了无用之神： “无论上帝是否存在，他都已跻身于最崇高也最无用的真理之列。” ⁶⁶他得出了与帕斯卡截然相反的结论。帕斯卡认为这场赌局至关重要，不容忽视。在1746年出版的《哲学思想录》中，狄德罗驳斥了帕斯卡的宗教体验，认为它过于主观：他和耶稣会士都对上帝充满热情，但对上帝的理解却截然不同。该如何抉择呢？这样的“上帝”不过是个人气质罢了。此时，在《致盲人的信》出版三年前，狄德罗仍然相信科学——唯有科学——能够驳斥无神论。他对设计论证提出了一个令人印象深刻的新解释。他敦促人们不要去探究宇宙的浩瀚运动，而是去探究自然界的内在结构。种子、蝴蝶或昆虫的构造都极其复杂，绝非偶然形成。在《哲学思想录》中，狄德罗仍然相信理性能够证明上帝的存在。牛顿摒弃了宗教的所有迷信和愚昧：一个能创造奇迹的上帝，与我们用来吓唬孩子的妖魔鬼怪没什么两样。

Diderot himself denied that he was an atheist. He simply said that he did not care whether God existed or not. When Voltaire objected to his book, he replied: “I believe in God, although I live very well with the atheists.… It is … very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all.” With unerring accuracy, Diderot had put his finger on the essential point. Once “God” has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, “he” does not exist. As Diderot pointed out in the same letter, it was pointless to believe in the God of the philosophers who never interferes with the affairs of the world. The Hidden God had become Deus Otiosus: “Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.”⁶⁶ He had come to the opposite conclusion to Pascal, who had seen the wager as of supreme importance and utterly impossible to ignore. In his Pensées Philosophiques, published in 1746, Diderot had dismissed Pascal’s religious experience as too subjective: he and the Jesuits had both been passionately concerned with God but had very different ideas about him. How to choose between them? Such a “God” was nothing but tempérament. At this point, three years before the publication of A Letter to the Blind, Diderot did believe that science—and science alone—could refute atheism. He evolved an impressive new interpretation of the argument from design. Instead of examining the vast motion of the universe, he urged people to examine the underlying structure of nature. The organization of a seed, a butterfly or an insect was too intricate to have happened by accident. In the Pensées Diderot still believed that reason could prove the existence of God. Newton had got rid of all the superstition and foolishness of religion: a God who worked miracles was on a par with the goblins with which we frighten our children.

然而，三年后，狄德罗开始质疑牛顿，不再相信外部世界能提供任何上帝存在的证据。他清楚地认识到，上帝与这门新兴科学毫无关系。但他只能用虚构的方式来表达这种革命性的、极具争议性的思想。在《致盲人的一封信》中，狄德罗虚构了一位牛顿主义者（他称之为“福尔摩斯先生”）与尼古拉斯·桑德森（1682-1739）之间的一场辩论。桑德森是已故的剑桥数学家，幼年失明。狄德罗让桑德森向福尔摩斯提问。如何用设计论证来调和像他这样的“怪物”和意外事件呢？他所展现的一切都与明智和仁慈的规划背道而驰：

Three years later, however, Diderot had come to question Newton and was no longer convinced that the external world provided any evidence for God. He saw clearly that God had nothing whatever to do with the new science. But he could only express this revolutionary and inflammatory thought in fictional terms. In A Letter to the Blind, Diderot imagined an argument between a Newtonian, whom he called “Mr. Holmes,” and Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), the late Cambridge mathematician who had lost his sight as a baby. Diderot makes Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such “monsters” and accidents as himself, who demonstrated anything but intelligent and benevolent planning:

牛顿以及许多传统基督徒所信奉的上帝，被认为对世间万物负有字面意义上的责任，这不仅荒谬，而且极其可怕。用“上帝”来解释我们目前无法解释的事物，是缺乏谦逊的表现。“我的好朋友，福尔摩斯先生，”狄德罗笔下的桑德森总结道，“承认你的无知吧。”

The God of Newton, and indeed of many conventional Christians, who was supposed to be literally responsible for everything that happens, was not only an absurdity but a horrible idea. To introduce “God” to explain things that we cannot explain at present was a failure of humility. “My good friend, Mr. Holmes,” Diderot’s Saunderson concludes, “admit your ignorance.”

在狄德罗看来，根本不需要造物主。物质并非牛顿和新教徒所想象的那种被动、卑微的东西，而是拥有自身的动力，遵循着自身的规律。正是这种物质规律——而非神圣的机械论者——造就了我们所看到的表象设计。除了物质之外，别无他物。狄德罗在斯宾诺莎的基础上更进一步。他并非认为除了自然之外别无上帝，而是声称只有自然，根本没有上帝。持有这种观点的人并非只有他一个：像亚伯拉罕·特伦布莱和约翰·特维尔·尼达姆这样的科学家发现了物质生成原理，这一原理如今已在生物学、显微镜学、动物学、博物学和地质学等领域逐渐成为一种假说。然而，很少有人愿意彻底与上帝决裂。即使是那些经常出入霍尔巴赫男爵保罗·海因里希（1723-1789）沙龙的哲学家们，尽管他们乐于进行坦诚的讨论，也并未公开拥护无神论。这些辩论催生了霍尔巴赫的著作《自然体系：或道德与物质世界的法则》（1770），该书后来被誉为无神论唯物主义的圣经。霍尔巴赫认为，自然本身并无超自然的替代方案，自然“不过是一条永不停息、相互交织的巨大因果链”。 ⁶⁸相信上帝是不诚实的，是对我们真实经验的否定，也是一种绝望的行为。宗教创造了神，因为人们找不到任何其他解释来安慰他们面对世间悲剧的心情。他们转向宗教和哲学中虚构的慰藉，试图建立某种虚幻的控制感，试图安抚某种他们所认为的“力量”。试想一下，潜伏在幕后，抵御恐惧和灾难。亚里士多德错了：哲学并非源于对知识的高尚渴望，而是源于对逃避痛苦的卑劣欲望。因此，宗教的摇篮是无知和恐惧，而一个成熟开明的人必须从中挣脱出来。

In Diderot’s view there was no need of a Creator. Matter was not the passive, ignoble stuff that Newton and the Protestants imagined, but had its own dynamic which obeys its own laws. It is this law of matter—not a Divine Mechanick—which is responsible for the apparent design we think we see. Nothing but matter existed. Diderot had taken Spinoza one step further. Instead of saying that there was no God but nature, Diderot had claimed that there was only nature and no God at all. He was not alone in his belief: scientists such as Abraham Trembley and John Turbeville Needham had discovered the principle of generative matter, which was now surfacing as an hypothesis in biology, microscopy, zoology, natural history and geology. Few were prepared to make a final break with God, however. Even the philosophers who frequented the salon of Paul Heinrich, Baron of Holbach (1723–89), did not publicly espouse atheism, though they enjoyed open and frank discussion. From these debates came Holbach’s book The System of Nature: or Laws of the Moral and Physical World (1770), which became known as the bible of atheistic materialism. There was no supernatural alternative to nature, which, Holbach argued, was “but an immense chain of causes and effects which unceasingly flow from one another.”⁶⁸ To believe in a God was dishonest and a denial of our true experience. It was also an act of despair. Religion created gods because people could not find any other explanation to console them for the tragedy of life in this world. They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to propitiate an “agency” they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster. Aristotle had been wrong: philosophy was not the result of a noble desire for knowledge but of the craven longing to avoid pain. The cradle of religion, therefore, was ignorance and fear, and a mature, enlightened man must climb out of it.

霍尔巴赫试图构建他自己的上帝史。最初，人类崇拜自然之力。这种原始的万物有灵论之所以能够被接受，是因为它没有试图超越尘世。当人们开始将太阳、风和海洋人格化，创造出与自身形象和样式相符的神祇时，腐败就开始了。最终，他们将所有这些小神祇融合为一个至高无上的神，而这不过是一种投射，充满了矛盾。几个世纪以来，诗人和神学家们除了……之外，什么也没做。

Holbach attempted his own history of God. First men had worshipped the forces of nature. This primitive animism had been acceptable because it had not tried to get beyond this world. The rot had set in when people had started to personify the sun, wind and sea to create gods in their own image and likeness. Finally they had merged all these godlings into one big Deity, which was nothing but a projection and a mass of contradictions. Poets and theologians had done nothing over the centuries but

历史表明，所谓上帝的善与他的全能是无法调和的。由于缺乏内在逻辑，上帝的概念注定会瓦解。哲学家和科学家们竭尽全力试图挽救它，但他们的境况并不比诗人、神学家好到哪里去。笛卡尔声称证明的“至高完美”不过是他想象的产物。就连伟大的牛顿也^“受制于他幼年时的偏见”。他发现了绝对空间，并从虚无中创造了一个上帝，而这个上帝只不过是“一个强大的人”，一个凌驾于人类之上的神圣暴君，将人类创造者贬为奴隶。 ⁶⁹

History shows that it is impossible to reconcile the so-called goodness of God with his omnipotence. Because it lacks coherence, the idea of God is bound to disintegrate. The philosophers and scientists have done their best to save it but they have fared no better than the poets and theologians. The “hautes perfections” that Descartes claimed to have proved were simply the product of his imagination. Even the great Newton was ^“a slave to the prejudices of his infancy.” He had discovered absolute space and created a God out of the void who was simply “un homme puissant,” a divine despot terrorizing his human creators and reducing them to the condition of slaves.⁶⁹

幸运的是，启蒙运动使人类摆脱了这种幼稚状态。科学取代了宗教。“如果说对自然的无知孕育了神灵，那么对自然的认知注定会毁灭它们。” ⁷⁰没有更高的真理或潜在的模式，也没有什么宏伟的设计。只有自然本身；

Fortunately the Enlightenment would enable humanity to rid itself of this infantilism. Science would replace religion. “If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.”⁷⁰ There are no higher truths or underlying patterns, no grand design. There is only nature itself;

上帝不仅没有必要，而且有害。到17世纪末，皮埃尔-西蒙·德·拉普拉斯（1749-1827）已将上帝从物理学中驱逐出去。行星系统被简化为从太阳延伸出的光芒，并且逐渐冷却。当拿破仑问他：“这是谁的著作？”拉普拉斯简单地回答：“Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

God was not merely unnecessary but positively harmful. By the end of the century, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827) had ejected God from physics. The planetary system had become a luminosity extending from the sun, which was gradually cooling. When Napoleon asked him: “Who was the author of this?” Laplace simply replied: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

几个世纪以来，所有信奉一神论的宗教都坚持认为，上帝并非仅仅是另一个存在。祂的存在方式与我们所经历的其他现象截然不同。然而，在西方，基督教神学家却习惯于谈论上帝，仿佛祂真的就是存在的事物之一。他们抓住新兴科学，试图证明上帝的客观存在，仿佛祂可以像其他任何事物一样被检验和分析。狄德罗、霍尔巴赫和拉普拉斯彻底颠覆了这种尝试，并得出了与那些更为极端的神秘主义者相同的结论：不存在任何事物。不久之后，其他科学家和哲学家也得意洋洋地宣称上帝已死。

For centuries monotheists in each of the God-religions had insisted that God was not merely another being. He did not exist like the other phenomena we experience. In the West, however, Christian theologians had got into the habit of talking about God as though he really were one of the things that existed. They had seized upon the new science to prove the objective reality of God as though he could be tested and analyzed like anything else. Diderot, Holbach and Laplace had turned this attempt on its head and come to the same conclusion as the more extreme mystics: there was nothing out there. It was not long before other scientists and philosophers triumphantly declared that God was dead.